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THE UNFORTUNATE 
COLONEL DESPARD 
AND OTHER STUDIES 



THE UNFORTUNATE 
COLONEL DESPARD 

AND OTHER STUDIES 



BY 

SIR CHARLES OMAN, K.B.E. 

Member of Parliament for the University of Oxford 
and Chichele Professor of Modern History 



LONDON 

EDWARD ARNOLD & CO 

1922 

[All rights reserved] 



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2. 3 



Printed in Great Britain by 
Butler & Tanner, Frame and London 



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Si 
^ PREFACE 

I have from time to time been asked by friends to make 
more accessible one or other of the eleven essays, or studies, 
which have now been collected into this volume. I may 
mention that six of them have appeared as articles in various 
magazines or reviews, three were addresses given to the 
Royal Historical Society, one was a lecture given at Cologne 
to classes from the Rhineland Army of Occupation, the 
eleventh is an unpublished study written last summer. 

I have to make grateful acknowledgement of the courtesy 
of the proprietors of Blackwood's Magazine, The Edinburgh 
Review, The Nineteenth Century and After, and The Economic 
Review, all of whom have permitted me to reprint certain 
papers which I contributed to their periodicals. From Black- 
wood come the essays on Colonel Despard, Arthur Thistle wood, 
and the Earthly Paradise; from The Edinburgh Review, the study 
of Lord Carteret ; from The Nineteenth Century, the article 
on the Trials of the Historian ; and from The Economic 
Review, the note on the Debasement of the English Currency 
by the Tudors. The Council of the Royal Historical Society 
also permit me to reproduce the three Presidential Addresses 
which I made to them in 1918-20 on Rumour in Time of 
War, the Historical Outlook of the Middle Ages, and the 
Drawing of Boundaries. 

Those of the essays which appeared some years back have 
had to suffer a certain amount of alteration ; the Great War 
caused much change of historical perspective ; and the article 
on Henry VIII and his strange dealings with the currency 
had to be rewritten, in view of the fact that the Chancellor of 



VI 



PREFACE 



the Exchequer of the late Coalition Ministry — first of all 
modern English statesmen — dared to follow in the steps of 
the Tudor king, and to present us with shillings exactly like 
those of 1545 in being composed of 50 per cent, silver and 
50 per cent, base metal. 

C. OMAN. 
Oxford, 

November, 1922. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. The Unfortunate Colonel Despard ... 1 

II. Arthur Thistlewood and Cato Street ... 22 

III. Rumour in Time of War ..... 49 

IV. Some Mediaeval Conceptions of Ancient History . 71 
V. A Forgotten Hero : Basil of Cappadocia . . 91 

VI. The Crusades ........ 116 

VII. Lord Carteret ....... 138 

VIII. On the Drawing of Boundaries, a.d. 1919-21 . 162 

IX. The Tudors and the Currency, 1526-60 . . 180 

X. The Modern Historian and His Difficulties . 204 

XI. The Earthly Paradise . . . . . .212 



ru 



THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 

I was one of the very few non-official spectators at the trial 
of Roger Casement. For long hours I watched the swarthy, 
sinister, yet not ill-favoured man in the dock, in his neat grey 
morning suit, following every word of the pleadings with an 
intent ear and a keen eye. 

Here, on trial for his life, was a man who had for a quarter 
of a century been in the service of the sovereign of Great 
Britain, who had been given high official posts, trusted with 
grave international inquiries, and honoured with the knight- 
hood of St. Michael and St. George. Yet he had bitten the 
hand that had fed him, betrayed the King whose honours he had 
accepted but two years back, continued to draw his pension 
when he was already intriguing with the public enemy, and 
stooped to endeavours to seduce poor half -starved soldiers in 
German prison-camps to break their military oath. It was a 
vile record, and only explicable to those who have heard his 
full tale, of which I say nothing. Surely this traitor's case is 
unparalleled — I found myself thinking — at least since the 
old Jacobite days, when allegiance sat light on unscrupulous 
men. For the Irish treason trials from 1797 onwards have 
nothing like it ; the United Irishmen and the Fenians were not 
led by renegade British officials of high rank, but by adven- 
turers like Wolfe Tone, Jacobin enthusiasts like Edward Fitz- 
gerald, idealists and dreamers like Robert Emmet, village 
priests and town tradesmen, with a sprinkling of small squireens. 
And the Dublin rebel chiefs of 1916, who faced the firing party 
before Casement went to the gallows, were men of the same 
type as their predecessors. None of them had eaten the King's 
bread for half a lifetime, or accepted a title and a pension from 
his hand. 

And then there came to me in the court, while the defendant's 

u.c.d. l b 



2 THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 

counsel droned, on with his unconvincing arguments, the memory 
of the one modern case of a man whose record was almost 
parallel to that of Casement, yet whose story is utterly for- 
gotten. Histories of the great French War barely mention it, 
or mention it not at all. I allude to the traitor whom his 
contemporaries sometimes called " the unfortunate Colonel 
Despard." A moment's reflection showed the most extra- 
ordinary similarity between the external aspects of his tale 
and that of Casement. Both were Irishmen of good family ; 
both entered the King's service early, and won rank and dis- 
tinction therein. Both were trusted with high and responsible 
posts — and both held those posts in the Tropics. Does twenty 
years in authority spent in Jamaica and British Honduras, or 
in the Cameroons and Brazil, lead to megalomania, or merely 
to relaxation of the moral fibre, with men of a certain type ? 
This much is certain, that both Despard, the petty despot of 
Belize, and Casement, Consul-General at Rio de Janeiro, came 
back when their colonial career was over, to engage in wild 
treason in Europe. Despard, as we shall see, had far more 
open provocation for his misdoings. But he ended, like 
Casement, in being convicted for seducing British soldiers from 
their allegiance, and went to the gallows with some of his dupes. 
So it may be worth while to tell the tale of Colonel Edward 
Marcus Despard and his treasons. He was born in Queen's 
County in 1751, one of the many sons of a typical Irish soldier- 
family of the old sort. All his five brothers, save the eldest, to 
whom fell the family estate, held commissions in the army ; and 
one of them, General John Despard, was a man of mark, who 
commanded in Cape Breton for eight years, and died honorary 
colonel of a West India Regiment in 1829. Edward, like most 
lads destined for the army in those days, started on his military 
career very early, obtaining an ensigncy in the 50th Regiment 
in 1766, when he was only fifteen. He served with the 50th 
for seven years, and got his lieutenancy in 1772, when the corps 
was stationed in Jamaica. Here they were found at the out- 
break of the War of American Independence in 1775 ; but the 
50th was so much under strength, after three years of tropical 
diseases, that it could not be sent as a unit to join the army of 
Howe. The serviceable men were drafted into battalions 



THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 3 

ordered to the front, and a skeleton cadre only was sent 
back to England to recruit. With it Despard did not sail. 
He had been seconded for special duty as an assistant engineer 
on the staff of the Governor of Jamaica. There can have 
been few British officers who did such a continuous term of 
service in the Caribbean Sea as Edward Despard, for between 
1772 and 1790 he seems to have been in England only for 
one visit. Another point to realize, when we try to fix his 
mentality, is that from the age of twenty-two onward he 
never served with his battalion. As a junior staff officer he 
was employed on all manner of small independent jobs, far 
from any supervising and immediate authority. Entrusted 
from the age of thirty onward with command, first on a small, 
and then on a larger scale, where no one could appeal to 
authority against his arbitrary rule without intolerable delays, 
he lost any idea of obedience that he may have imbibed 
during his years of service as a very young ensign and lieutenant. 
Though stationed in the West Indies during the whole 
of the Great War with France and America, Despard only 
saw service against the brown militia of the Spanish Main. 
In 1779 he smelt powder for the first time in one of those 
nightmare expeditions to which British statesmen, who used 
small-scale maps of America, frequently condemned a handful 
of British soldiers. This was the absolutely insane San 
Juan raid, which would be completely forgotten but for 
the fact that one of the very few officers who returned from 
it alive was Captain Horatio Nelson of H.M.S. Hinchinbrooke, 
later of the Nile and Trafalgar. Lord George Germaine, the 
Secretary for War, of evil Minden memory, concluded that 
as Central America was an isthmus, the strip of land, which 
looked narrow enough on the map of the world, between the 
mouth of the San Juan river on the Atlantic side and the 
town of Leon on the Pacific, might be seized and held, and 
the Spanish empire in America cut in twain. The distance 
from ocean to ocean was 150 miles as the crow flies, much 
more by the route which Nelson's expedition was to take. 
The force employed was absurdly small — 400 regular troops, 
white and black, from Jamaica, any seamen that could be 
spared from the crew of Nelson's frigate, a few scores of boatmen 



4 THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 

from the small British, settlement on the Honduras coast. 
It was vaguely hoped that a multitude of savage auxiliaries 
could be enlisted from the Mosquito Indians of the Nicaraguan 
shore. Everything, of course, went wrong ; only a handful 
of Indians could be collected, the boats and boatmen from 
the Honduras settlement were three weeks late. The soldiers 
were beginning to sicken before the flotilla started ; no single 
soul on the expedition knew how far the San Juan river was 
navigable. But Nelson's will was there to drive. The little 
force started up-stream. Ten days they laboured in the 
sweltering heat, and then found that the river would serve 
them no more. Many men could no longer march, but the 
survivors pressed through the jungle for two days, and dis- 
covered the fort of San Juan, the central guard-post of the 
isthmus, which lay some miles below the great lake of Nicar- 
agua. The Spanish governor shut himself up and offered a 
passive resistance only ; the fort on its rock seemed impreg- 
nable. Nelson's men were dying like flies, but he persisted ; 
a gun or two was dragged up from the portage where the 
boats had been left, and a feeble cannonade opened. Nelson 
himself and Despard were almost the only officers left fit for 
service by this time ; " almost every gun that was fired 
was laid by one or other of them." Twenty -three years later, 
when the former commander of the Hinchinbroohe appeared 
to give evidence at his sometime comrade's trial, he spoke 
up most vehemently as to Despard's gallantry and exertions. 
" We went to the Spanish Main together ; we slept many 
nights together in our clothes upon the ground ; we measured 
the height of the enemies' wall together ; in all that period 
no man could have shown more zealous attachment to his 
Sovereign and his country than he did." 

After six days' ineffective bombardment the garrison of 
San Juan capitulated ; not from the results of Nelson's 
gunnery, but because their water supply had been cut off. 
The capture of the fort did not help the expedition to any 
further advance — there was nobody left fit to march, and 
the situation was not helped by the arrival of a few hundred 
reinforcements sent by the Governor of Jamaica. The rainy 
season was now come, and men sickened as soon as they 



THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 5 

arrived. Finally the fever conquered : the relics of the 
expeditionary force returned to Jamaica. 

Nelson came back a wreck — it was a wonder that his slight 
frame had withstood those dreadful months ; he was invalided 
home, and well-nigh died at Bath. Despard, unluckily for 
himself, took little harm from the experience. His creditable 
service was acknowledged by his promotion to a captaincy 
in the 79th Regiment — not the Highland corps of to-day, 
but the " Liverpool Blues," a short-lived battalion raised 
in 1778 and disbanded in 1784. Despard never joined it, 
or did duty as a regimental officer. If, like Nelson, he had 
been invalided home in 1788, and transferred to some other 
sphere of war, far from the West Indies, he might have died 
a loyal soldier. 

Next year he was given a very responsible charge. The 
majority of the British settlers — log-wood cutters for the 
most part — who plied their trade on the coast of Honduras 
or on the Mosquito shore, had been forced to retire to the island 
of Roatan, which lies some ten miles off the mainland. It 
was a convenient port of call for privateers, and a small garrison 
was kept there, supplied from Jamaica. Hither Despard 
was sent with a temporary commission as Lieutenant - 
Colonel. 

It is now that we find Despard showing the first signs 
of the want of sense of discipline which was to be his ruin. 
On arriving at Cape Gracias a Dios, the angle of the coast 
from which Honduras slopes away west and Nicaragua south, 
he found there his superior officer, a Colonel Hodgson, who 
was theoretically in charge of all the surviving British settle- 
ments on the Central American coast. Despard's biographer, 
Bannatyne, passes over what then happened in the most 
matter-of-fact way, as if it presented no special cause of surprise. 
" On arriving, he found His Majesty's service likely to be 
injured by the appointment of Colonel H to chief com- 
mand. This officer was so obnoxious to the inhabitants 
that they refused to serve under him, and at the same time 

presented a unanimous address to Colonel D offering 

to put themselves under his command. To prevent the 
colony from being lost to the crown, he accepted their offer, 



6 THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 

and assumed the command." Hodgson had to depart to 
Jamaica. His successor — whose rise to authority reminds 
one of the simple methods in vogue among the buccaneers 
who haunted this same coast a century before — though 
technically only Governor of Roatan, assumed charge of 
the whole region. He justified his lawless action by success ; 
for he organized an expedition which captured the Spanish 
fort upon the Rio Negro, the main hostile establishment in 
the neighbourhood, and with the aid of the Mosquito Indians 
he dominated the whole shore as far south as the San Juan 
river. 

So in 1783, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, and 
Great Britain was forced to accept the terms imposed on 
her by France, Spain and the Americans, she had, thanks to 
Despard, some pledges left to barter with in Central America. 
Much had to be given up — the Rio Negro Fort, the Isle 
of Roatan, and all the trading posts south from Cape Gracias 
a Dios. But she was left " the Bay of Honduras Settlement," 
as it was then called, what we now style the colony of British 
Honduras. Despard was given the delicate and difficult 
task of administering the colony, with the modest title of 
" Superintendent of His Majesty's Affairs within the district 
which, by the late Treaty of Peace, has been allotted to the 
Log-Cutters upon the Bay of Honduras," and the still more 
modest salary of £500 a year. He was left in an absolutely 
autocratic position, without any colleagues or council, and he 
administered the settlement with no official staff save his 
admiring secretary and biographer, James Bannatyne. The 
only appeal from him was primarily to the Governor of Jamaica, 
and, in a last resort, to the Secretary of State in Whitehall. 

For seven years Despard ruled British Honduras, in one 
constant round of disputes and protests. The Spaniards 
were not his main trouble, though occasionally they made 
attempts to enforce the exact terms of the treaty of 1783 
by violence. The real trouble of the Superintendent came 
from the British settlers. There were two groups of them 
always at feud. The one consisted of the 700 original inhabi- 
tants of the " Bay Settlement," the small log-cutting and 
trading community which had always been established there. 



THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 7 

The other was formed by the expelled adventurers from 
the Mosquito Coast, Roatan, and the other points which 
had been given up to the Spaniards. Many of them had 
served in the more or less irregular bands which Despard 
had led as " Provincials," in the San Juan expedition and 
the capture of the Rio Negro forts. They were a pugnacious 
and self-assertive crew, and were the Superintendent's old 
friends, who had aided him to expel Hodgson. Now, when 
a group of new settlers falls in among an already existing 
community of a similar class, which has established rights, 
trouble is sure to follow. The exiles outnumbered the original 
colonists — there were 2,000 of them, counting their negro 
slaves and dependents. 

There was no doubt ample room in the settlement for 
everybody ; but the old inhabitants had partitioned off the 
more eligible tracts, near the rivers and round the settle- 
ments, into spheres of interest which they had been accus- 
tomed to exploit. Wherever the Mosquito Coast men ran 
up their huts and began to fell timber, they were — so they 
said — warned off as trespassers on the beat of some claimant 
who had often not been seen near the spot for years. Hence 
affrays and litigation. And the Superintendent, acting as 
court of appeal with some accessors selected by himself, 
always sided with the new settlers. This drove the " original 
inhabitants " to angry protest, and Despard did not tolerate 
criticism. 

Looking through the tedious archives of British Honduras 
in the Record Office, one soon discovers the way things worked. 
Mr. James Usher, one of the magistrates, resigns, and justifies 
himself by an " Address to the Inhabitants " which ends — 
" Should I advance that the Court of Appeal is illegal, 
oppressive and unjust, that Trial by Jury is thereby done 
away, and that decisions made when there is not a full board 
are entirely the Superintendent's decrees, I shall, I suppose, 
be prosecuted. If the smiles of power are to be obtained 
by no other method than cringing, creeping and fawning, 
let those court them who will ; for from my own knowledge 
of the Superintendent's former opinion of his present favourites, 
I do not hesitate to say that now ' the Post of Honour is a 



§ THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 

private station ! ' " Usher was right in supposing that he 
would be prosecuted : he was arrested by Despard and charged 
with publishing " a false, seditious and malicious libel, evidence 
of a depraved mind and a diabolical disposition." But the 
Grand Jury of the Colony was full of " old inhabitants " — 
they were the wealthier part of the community — and " ignored 
the bill " : I have seen their Ignoramus scrawled across it. 
Enraged at Usher's escape, Despard on his own authority 
declared all the police and judicial institutes of the Colony 
cancelled and abolished. After an interval of autocratic 
rule he held a poll for a new bench of magistrates, and struck 
out on technical grounds some of the persons returned. His 
opponents wrote fierce protests to Jamaica and Whitehall 
against " the barbarous commanding officer on the Honduras 
Coast." 

The desks and waste-paper baskets, both of the Governor 
of Jamaica and the Secretary of State at Whitehall, grew all 
too familiar with petitions and appeals, and lengthy replies 
by the King's Superintendent. Apparently these distant 
potentates shelved the question again and again : it was 
a " tale of little meaning though the words were strong ! " 
But at last a new Secretary arose in Whitehall, Lord Grenville, 
a stiff and untiring man who, unlike his predecessor, was 
one of those who read his American dispatches — as had his 
unfortunate father, George Grenville, in 1765. He came 
to the conclusion that there must be something wrong in 
the Bay Settlement, and, without relieving Despard from 
office, told him to come home, as investigations into his rule 
were about to be made. The King's Superintendent sailed 
at once, and reached London in May, 1790. His biographer 
tells us that he was well provided with documents proving 
the popularity which he enjoyed with the " vast majority " 
of the inhabitants of the Colony — i.e. the new settlers — and 
that he wished for nothing so much as a public inquiry into 
his whole conduct since first he took command at Roatan 
in 1781. He was not to get it. Instead he found himself 
entangled in the meshes of red tape. For two years he was 
having interviews with under-secretaries, answering interro- 
gatories, drawing up minutes in defence of particular acts. 



THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 9 

With constant references to Jamaica and Belize, the matter 
dragged on interminably. Despard became one of the regular 
hangers-on in the ante-room of the Secretary of State, always 
awaiting an ever-deferred decision. It came at last, after 
two long years, and was most unsatisfactory. He was not 
to be prosecuted, said Lord Grenville ; indeed, it was hard 
to see that any valid charges could be formulated against 
him. But when Despard expressed his intention of returning 
at once to resume his rule in Honduras, he was informed that 
the post of King's Superintendent was abolished ; he had 
reverted to the position of a half-pay colonel, and might 
apply for other employment. 

But no employment came his way. Despard was a marked 
man, as he soon found — noted down (and quite rightly) as 
quarrelsome and tyrannical. There would be no more colonial 
jobs for him. His first outburst of anger took the form of 
sending in to Whitehall interminable bills for money spent, 
or alleged to be spent, on Government service in the Hon- 
duras. They were disputed, and never settled. Then came 
a new mental development in the disappointed ex-autocrat. 
He suddenly saw that all was rotten in Great Britain, that 
the Constitution as administered by Mr. Pitt was a solemn 
sham, that the country was being exploited by a ring of 
aristocratic jobbers, and that the people must be freed on 
the new French lines of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. 
In short, he joined the steadily dwindling band of enthusiasts 
whom the historians call the " English Jacobins," the flam- 
boyant band of admirers of the French Revolution who made 
so much noise in proportion to their numbers between 1793 
and 1798. 

There is a terrible gap in the domestic history of England 
still waiting for the writer who shall work out the inner annals 
of the " Corresponding Society " and the other disloyal associa- 
tions of the early years of the Revolutionary War. Till it 
is filled, I fear that the exact place of Despard in the agitation 
cannot be determined. This, however, is certain, that in 
1798 he was one of the small group of traitors in London 
who were in correspondence both with the Irish rebels and 
with the French. Their agents, Binns and Allin, were captured, 



10 THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 

along with the priest O'Quigley and Arthur O'Connor, as 
they were trying to pass from Kent to the Continent. Des- 
pard's name appears in connexion with this plot both in 
Castlereagh's secret correspondence and — what is more damn- 
ing — in both the deposition of O'Quigley himself and in the 
autobiography of Wolfe Tone, wherein he is spoken of as 
the selected leader of the party who were ready to do some- 
thing in the way of practical insurrection, in order to help 
the Irish rising of 1798. Naturally, therefore, he was among 
the limited number of persons who were arrested by Pitt 
and clapped into prison : the Habeas Corpus Act was sus- 
pended at the time, and had been for several years. I take 
it that O'Quigley's and Tone's evidence is good enough to 
upset the easy Whig tale, which is repeated in many partisan 
histories, that Despard was an innocent man, who had made 
himself unpopular with the governing bureaucracy by clamour- 
ing for an investigation of his doings in Honduras, and by 
his claims for a settlement of his accounts, and that he was 
put into prison merely to keep him quiet. What is certain 
is that he was confined without a trial for more than two 
years, and only released in the winter of 1800-1, when the 
French War was obviously verging towards its end, and when 
the dangers of domestic sedition were thought to be dying 
down, in view of the approaching general peace. The 
" Corresponding Society " was long dead ; its members, 
for the most part, had relapsed into simple Whiggery, or had 
retired to nurse their theories in idle discontent. 

But the newly released prisoner had lost all power of cool 
judgment, and was simply set on revenge, in season or out 
of season. And the fact that he could find no fellow-con- 
spirators of any note or personal importance did not suffice 
to warn him of the futility of his enterprise. There were 
some bread riots during the winter of 1801, and election riots 
of a sinister sort in the following year, when a Nottingham 
mob is said to have displayed the red cap of Liberty as its 
standard. The inchoate mutiny in the fleet at Bantry Bay 
in December, 1801, though put down at once with a firm hand, 
seemed to indicate that the evil days of 1797 were not so 
far off as had been thought. There was enough trouble on 



THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 11 

foot to encourage a rancorous fanatic such as Despard had 
now become. " The people are everywhere ripe," he said, 
" and anxious for the moment of attack, particularly in 
Leeds, in Sheffield, in Birmingham, and in every capital city 
of England, and here, in and round London, they are ripe 
too. I have travelled about twenty miles in the day, and 
the people, wherever I have been, are ready." 

His view was that the whole of industrial England was 
seething with discontent, and that to produce an explosion 
it was only necessary to start with an armed revolt in London. 
The blow must be struck at head-quarters, and then the whole 
realm would flare up. The initial difficulty was the collection 
of the nucleus of determined men who were to start the rising. 
It is here that the insane rashness of the scheme emerges. 
After a year of propaganda Despard had collected as his 
lieutenants and co-organizers only the very dregs of the old 
" Corresponding Society," a handful of London tradesmen and 
artisans of the Jacobin type. Of all of them only one, Emblin, 
a watchmaker in Chelsea, had been a well-known member 
of the " Corresponding Society," and had sometimes gone 
on its errands to sound in vain the official Whigs. For the rest, 
they were busy, and often apparently very magniloquent, talkers . 
Many contemporaries — for example, that very Radical Whig, 
Major Cart wright — and almost every historian who has 
written during the last hundred years, have declared Despard 
a lunatic. I am constrained to take a different view. Two 
governing facts must be remembered, which were obvious 
to every discontented man in 1801, but have been completely 
forgotten. The first fact was that every one then alive who 
had reached the age of thirty could easily remember a moment 
when London was for three days in the hands of a wild and 
mischievous mob, which did whatever it pleased in the way 
of arson and pillage. And this mob had no organization 
or definite political ends, being called into being by the work 
of a single crack-brained enthusiast. I refer, of course, to 
the Gordon Riots of June 2-9, 1780. It was open to any 
malignant plotter to believe that a similar, but far more 
formidable, mob could be raised by a man or men who had 
created a basis of secret societies to work and officer it. 



12 THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 

But we must also remember that, only three years before 
Despard started his propaganda, there had been a much 
more serious phenomenon seen than even the Gordon Riots 
— a widespread mutiny of the armed forces of the Crown. 
The Navy had then been the body affected, and all that had 
happened at the Nore and Spithead was well remembered in 
London. Nothing had come of that mutiny, partly because 
the leaders were unknown and incapable men, partly because 
the sailors were rather strikers agitating for better conditions 
of service than rebels wishing to overthrow the Constitution 
of their country. But the Mutiny at the Nore had terrified 
the whole nation, and rightly, since if the French had put 
to sea while it was in progress, any sort of disaster might 
have happened. Then there had been a mild echo of naval 
mutiny as late as the winter of 1 801-2 in Bantry Bay. Despard 
thought that he could organize a similar rising in the Army. 
The conditions of the soldier's life were little, if at all, better 
in 1800 than those of the sailor's. There were many ill- 
managed and discontented battalions. Despard thought that 
he could organize inter-regimental secret societies, which 
would gradually prepare the way for a sort of military rising 
comparable to the Mutiny at the Nore. It was to synchronize 
with a civil rising comparable to the Gordon Riots. There 
is no doubt that he had hit upon the Bolshevist idea of the 
" Soviet of Soldiers and Workmen." Personally he seems 
to have specialized on the First and Third Battalions of the 
Grenadier Guards, to one of which (and mostly to the Third 
Battalion) nearly all the numerous soldiers whose names are 
found in the record of his trial as defendants or as witnesses, 
or merely as individuals mentioned in the story, seem to 
belong. No doubt these battalions appear mainly because 
they were garrisoned in London, where they were accessible 
to the members of a conspiracy domiciled in the metropolis. 
The start was made with men who had good reasons for 
recklessness. We note in the dock or the witness-box corporals 
who had twice lost their stripes, men who had been repeatedly 
flogged, and others who had been deserters and had been 
recaptured. Granted a nucleus of reckless and discontented 
men, a kind of systematic proselytism could begin. But 



THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 13 

the danger to the conspirators was that in feeling about for 
converts they were certain ere long to hit upon the wrong 
man — some soldier who had obvious reasons for grumbling, 
yet who was not prepared to become a rebel. The striking 
thing is, that of some hundreds of men who must have known 
with more or less certainty that something sinister was brewing, 
not one went to delate the plot to his colonel. To betray 
comrades in that way would have been contrary to all the 
traditions of the barrack-room. 

Some of the companies of the Third Grenadiers must have 
been riddled with sedition. The men were attending in small 
parties at propagandist meetings held in at least a dozen 
different obscure taverns in the East End and Southwark. 
For every individual who became a regular conspirator, swore 
his oath, and received his ticket, there must have been half 
a dozen who refused to commit themselves, who drank the 
beer and gin of the society, and went off with a vague promise 
that they would think matters over. Probably for most 
it was merely a superior and rather exciting form of " grousing." 
There was, however, a small number of discontented and 
ambitious soldiers who took the matter seriously, and were 
active agents in the plot. The two whose names occur most 
frequently were John Wood of the First and John Francis of 
the Third Battalion of the Grenadiers. The name of one 
or other of them appears in the evidence of nearly every one 
of the witnesses at the trial of the conspirators. Both were 
busy swearing in members of the secret society, and Francis 
had been nominated a " colonel " in Despard's organiza- 
tion. 

The civil branch of the conspiracy was organized in bodies 
of ten men, each recruited by a " captain " who was respon- 
sible for their loyalty. Each five captains were responsible 
to a " colonel," and the " colonels " were grouped locally 
in divisions, of which we only know that there was one in 
Southwark, one in Marylebone, one in Spitalfields, and another 
" from Blackwall and upward," each composed of several 
" subdivisions " under a colonel. Over all was the Com- 
mander-in-Chief, Despard himself. The really dangerous 
element was the military branch — it is said that there were 



14 THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 

over three hundred of the Third Grenadier Guards, and some 
thirty or forty of the First Battalion, who had sworn the 
oath. 

The majority of the affiliated members never saw Despard, 
but favoured individuals were privately introduced to him 
by one of their " colonels " at some obscure rendezvous, 
if it was thought that they might be useful. More often 
orders were issued and meetings convened by one of what 
was called " the Executive," of which we can only say that 
John Francis, John Macnamara, an Irishman, a man called 
Pendrill who was never brought to trial, and one or two 
more, were members. The secret recognition sign of the society 
was a card, which contained the oath administered to members 
on their initiation. It was headed — " Constitution : the 
Independence of Great Britain and Ireland. The Equaliza- 
tion of all civil, political and religious rights. An ample 
provision for the families of heroes who shall fall in the Contest. 
A liberal reward for distinguished merit." Then came the 
actual oath — " In the awful presence of Almighty God, I, 

A B , do voluntarily declare that I will endeavour 

to the utmost of my power to gain those rights which the 
Supreme Being, in His infinite bounty, has given to all men : 
that neither hopes nor fears, rewards nor punishments, shall 
ever induce me to give any information, directly or indirectly, 
concerning the business of this or any similar society, so help 
me God ! " After reading this formula aloud to the initiator 
the new member kissed the card. 

The meetings of the fractions of the organization were 
numerous, garrulous, and well watered with various strong 
drinks. Those admitted to the august presence of Despard 
himself were given brandy and water ; at the general gather- 
ings beer, porter and gin are more frequently mentioned. 
There is a glimpse of one conference which makes one long 
for a verbatim report : it is given by one Thomas Blades, 
a perverted soldier. "On a Sunday night John Francis 
met me and asked me to go down to the Black Raven. We 
found there Wood, Wratten, Tyndall, Macnamara, and six 
or seven Irishmen, all in a state of intoxication — about twelve 
or thirteen persons in all. The discussion we had then was 



THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 15 

concerning forms of government." Imagination fails to picture 
the details of a debate on high political theory between three 
mutinous privates of the Guards, three discontented London 
tradesmen, and seven Irishmen all very drunk ! 

By the autumn of 1802 the bolder spirits began to clamour 
for practical deeds. The " Executive " seems to have con- 
sidered that it was time to move. Despard had hitherto, 
as it seems, been against immediate action — as well he might 
be. The Peace of Amiens was toning down political bitter- 
ness, and spreading false hopes of quiet and prosperity. He 
had said " there was nothing to be done, he was expecting 
news and money from France." This curious phrase, if pro- 
perly reported by the witness — one of the soldier-conspirators 
— was notable : it is the only sign that Despard was in touch 
with the Continent. It is quite possible that he may have 
been sounding the French Government through some of his 
friends, the exiled Irish rebels, as Robert Emmet was certainly 
doing at the same time. 

Whatever may have been the case with regard to hopes 
of foreign aid, there is no doubt that matters quickened up 
in the society during August and September. It was deter- 
mined that there should be a rising in November. At one 
meeting a soldier-conspirator confessed that " we all drawed 
our bayonets, and swore that we would have a time fixed 
for a grand attack on the Tower, before the company broke 
up." The day chosen was that of the opening of Parliament, 
November 23. It remained that the details should be settled. 
On this there was high debate and interminable discussion. 
The minor people had each his plan, in which he himself 
was to have the leading part. The most effective project 
was certainly that for seizing the Tower. The desperate 
men would rush the arms-racks of the battalion, arm the 
other malcontents, and carry away the rest of the corps by 
surprise and terror, for they would be unarmed. This plan 
must have involved the shooting of the officers, but there 
is not a word said about that detail in any of the depositions. 
The Tower was full of munitions of all kinds, and these were 
to be distributed to the mob which the society thought that 
it could raise in the East End and the Borough. There 



16 THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 

was another scheme for a dash at the Bank of England, where 
were a certain number of muskets — six hundred it is said 
— stored in the vaults. But it was apparently Despard 
himself who insisted that an essential part of the insurrec- 
tion must be the murder of the King. The personality of 
George III had counted for so much in the suppression of 
the Gordon Riots twenty-two years before, that it was held 
that without him the constituted authorities in London would 
be helpless. Three witnesses at the trial deposed to the 
exact words that the Colonel used : "I have weighed the 
matter well, and my heart is callous." The plan was to stop 
the King's state coach between St. James's Palace and West- 
minster on the day of the opening of Parliament. He would 
come out of the back door of the Palace, and the escort of 
Horse Guards would be waiting for him some way down 
the Mall. There would be a crowd assembled to watch the 
show, and the conspirators would mingle with them, and 
run in upon the coach just as it was starting, and before it 
had picked up the escort. " Take and shoot two of the horses 
and the carriage must stop," said Broughton, one of the 
Colonel's chief confidants. Some one then asked, " But 
who would execute so dangerous a thing ? " Despard replied, 
" That he would do it with his own hand." There was then 
much talk on a less practicable scheme — three or four witnesses 
depose to it. Wood, of the Eirst Grenadiers, said that his 
company would be finding the guard over " the Great Gun 
in the Park " — i.e. the old gun from the Sovereign of the 
Seas, which stood at the back of the Admiralty till it was 
replaced in 1803 by the Turkish cannon from Egypt, now 
on the Parade hard by. He could arrange that he himself 
and a confidant or two should be sentries at the gun ; they 
would privily load it and fire it into the Royal coach as it 
defiled at a foot's-pace in front of the muzzle. We have 
curious reports of the reception of this scheme. The witness 
Emblin declared that he said, " Good God ! do you consider 
how many people will be there that day, and how many lives 
you will take ? " Broughton answered, " Then, damn them, 
let them get out of the way. It will play hell with the houses 
at the Treasury and round about there." Some one objected, 



THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 17 

" The cannon may be trained too low or high, and miss His 
Majesty." Broughton replied, " Then, damn him, we must 
run in and manhandle him." All this was in Despard's 
presence. 

The evidence agrees that there were to be at least three 
separate coups de main carried out on November 23. One 
was to be the murder of the King in the Mall or the Horse 
Guards Parade, carried out under Despard's superintendence, 
and followed by a raid on the Houses of Parliament ; the 
second was to be a mutiny of the Third Grenadiers at the 
Tower ; the third was to be the seizing of the Bank of England. 
" If we have the Tower and the Bank we have everything," 
were Despard's words, according to one witness. He added 
that the coaches starting for the country must be stopped, 
and that the "telegraphs" — i.e. the semaphores communi- 
cating with Dover, Portsmouth and other garrisons — must 
be destroyed, in order that matters might be finished in 
London before the news got round the country. 

Would the scheme ever have worked ? There were 
desperate men in it, and something might have been done, 
but one has a suspicion that at the last a great many con- 
spirators would have found it convenient not to be present 
at the appointed rendezvous. Possibly the King might have 
been murdered — conceivably the mutiny at the Tower might 
have come off ; but it is incredible that any measure of success 
would have followed. The mob was relied upon as the main 
weapon, and the mob was unorganized, and the destined 
leaders belonging to the conspiracy were few and obscure. 
Not far from London were thousands of troops, at Windsor, 
Chatham, Colchester, Portsmouth, Canterbury, etc., who 
do not seem to have been affected by the military plot ; there 
is very little trace of any attempt to spread the propaganda 
among them in the depositions of any of the witnesses. It 
is specially mentioned that none of the regiments of Household 
Cavalry, though they were quartered in London, were the 
least affected. There might have been some bloody work 
in the streets that day, but it seems unlikely that anything 
more serious would have happened. 

But the striking-power of Despard's gang was never to 

u.o.d. e 



18 THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 

be tested. The reckless way in which possible recruits were 
sounded, and were often admitted to some of the secrets of 
the Association, had its inevitable results. For the last four 
or five months the Government had been in possession of a 
good deal of information concerning the conspiracy. Besides 
vague reports as to secret meetings of soldiers and others 
in various taverns about the Tower, they got in July a definite 
story. It was told by one Thomas Windsor, a private in 
the Third Grenadiers, an old soldier of eleven years' standing. 
This man came to the office of Mr. William Bownass, an army 
agent, and told him that there was mischief afoot in his 
battalion, that a secret society had been working in it for some 
months, and that he himself had just been sworn in as a 
member, though he had no intention of joining in the mutiny. 
He had only taken the oath in order to see what was up. 
As a testimony of the existence of the movement, he produced 
the oath-card on which he had been sworn. Bownass told 
him to retain his membership, to keep his ears open, and 
to report to him from time to time what was brewing. For 
the last four months of the history of the conspiracy, Windsor 
was sending in reports from time to time, which went to the 
Home Office. Till September there was nothing on which 
Despard and his lieutenants could have been arrested, except 
the charge of forming a secret society and administering 
illegal oaths. The Ministers resolved to let the matters come 
to a head before striking. In October the definite assassina- 
tion plot cropped up, and it was getting time to act. When 
it came out that the meeting of Parliament was to give the 
signal for the revolt, measures were taken to be a week early 
with the conspirators. The plot was to burst out on Novem- 
ber 23. Seven days before, a great force of " Bow Street 
Officers," under Mr. John Stafford, chief clerk of the police 
office at Union Hall, surrounded a tavern in Lambeth called 
the Oakley Arms, and there arrested all the members present 
at one of the meetings of the society. They were about thirty 
in number, including Despard himself, " the only person 
there with the appearance of a gentleman." 

The arrest seems to have been a tame affair. On the 
entry of the constables the Colonel and his friends were found 



THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 19 

seated at a long table in the club-room of the inn. " Some 
of them were for getting up and looked rather alarmed." 
They were told to keep their seats, that a warrant was out 
against them, and that they must submit to be searched. 
Despard was " rather angry and indignant " ; he walked up 
and down protesting, asked to be shown the warrant, and 
said that he would not allow a hand to be laid on him. He 
was searched nevertheless, but no paper of any importance 
was found ; indeed, the only compromising documents dis- 
covered that night were five of the printed oath-cards which 
served as the private tokens of the society. 

The Grand Jury of Surrey found a true bill against the 
Colonel and his associates on January 21, and the trial came 
off on February 7, 1803, at the Sessions House, Newington, 
before Lord Ellenborough, the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Alex- 
ander Thompson, Sir Simon Leblanc, and Sir Alan Chambre. 
The prosecution was conducted by Spencer Perceval, then 
Attorney-General, but destined a few years later to be Prime 
Minister and to fall by the hand of an assassin. Despard 
asked that his trial might be conducted apart from that of 
the rest, and this was granted him. He had as his counsel 
Serjeant Best, afterwards a judge of the King's Bench, and 
Mr. Gurney. 

Four persons who had been in the plot — three soldiers 
and the watchmaker Emblin — were allowed to turn King's 
evidence, thereby saving their necks. On these four men's 
depositions the case against Despard mainly rested ; but 
five or six more witnesses, mostly soldiers, were produced 
to prove that they had been sounded by one or other of the 
chief agents of Despard, and had gathered enough about 
the object of the plot to make them determined to keep out 
of it. None of them had " split " upon their comrades till 
the crash had come. Their stories bore every mark of being 
given with reluctance. The^ most damning evidence was 
concerning a meeting at the Flying Horse Tavern on Novem- 
ber 12, when the Colonel had laid down the details of the 
assassination of the King to a select committee, and it was 
curiously corroborated by the landlady of the inn, who said 
that, standing in her bar, she had heard in the next room 



20 THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 

Despard break out in a very loud voice with the words — 
" I have weighed everything well, and my heart is callous," 
which were attributed to him by several of the other wit- 
nesses. 

Serjeant Best refused to give any explanation of Des- 
pard's presence at the Oakley Arms on November 16, or 
of his tavern colloquies during the preceding year. He simply 
pleaded that the Colonel's early career rendered it unnecessary 
to go into such things. He produced Lord Nelson as a witness, 
to prove that Despard had been a loyal and zealous officer 
in the old American war : but Nelson had not seen him since 
1780. Best's junior, Gurney, who followed, took another 
line. It was easy enough to blacken the characters of the 
witnesses for the prosecution. They were ruffians, informers 
acting in collusion, agents "provocateurs : the plot was a figment, 
like the imaginary Popish plot in the reign of Charles II. 

Lord Ellenborough invited the Colonel himself to make 
any observations that he thought fit, to supplement the 
pleading of his counsel. It was expected that he would 
either deny the existence of any plot, on his honour, or else 
take the other line — avow himself a Republican and a patriot, 
and justify his plans by a tirade upon the unconstitutional 
and corrupt form of government under which his country 
was suffering. Despard did neither, but simply observed, 
" My lord, my counsel have acquitted themselves so ably, 
and so much to my satisfaction, that I have nothing at all 
to say." In short, he refused to deny that a plot had been 
formed or that he had a part in it. 

The jury was only absent for twenty-five minutes, and 
returned to find the prisoner guilty. They added that they 
recommended him to mercy because of his former good char- 
acter and eminent services. This, I think, was less a testi- 
monial to Despard than a mark of the general enthusiasm 
of the day in favour of Nelson, who had spoken up so strongly 
for his old comrade. 

On the next day but one, twelve of Despard's associates 
appeared in the dock. The jury convicted nine of the twelve ; 
the other three were acquitted. The Crown exercised its 
prerogative of mercy in the cases of three more, for whom 



THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 21 

the death penalty was commuted for long terms of penal 
servitude. 

On Monday, February 21, the Colonel and his six companions 
— John Francis and John Wood, both of the Grenadier Guards, 
Thomas Broughton, carpenter, John Macnamara, an old 
member of the " United Irishmen," James Wratten, and 
Arthur Graham, artisans, were executed in public, in front 
of the Surrey County Jail at Newington. Despard showed 
no signs of weakness or of repentance. He refused to see 
a clergyman of any denomination, and displayed a sort of 
stoic composure. On the scaffold he made a short speech, 
in which he declared that he was no more guilty of the crime 
of which he was accused — treason — than any of those who 
were listening to him. By this he obviously meant that 
to attempt to overthrow the existing regime was not treason, 
not that he had made no such attempt. For he added that 
he had spent his life in the service of the nation, and was 
suffering for his endeavour. The method of the execution 
was not according to the barbarous formula for high treason 
— the seven condemned men were merely hanged ; after half 
an hour they were cut down, and their dead bodies were 
beheaded — the executioner holding up the head of each with 
the words, " This is the head of a traitor ! " This was the 
last occasion but one on which decapitation was used. Thistle- 
wood's case in 1821 was the only subsequent example. 

Thus ended a plot undoubtedly real and dangerous, yet 
as undoubtedly doomed to failure from the first, because its 
framer had lost all sense of balance and reality. It was the 
product not of well-reasoned judgment, but of injured vanity 
and rancorous megalomania. The autocrat of Belize had been 
ignored by Ministers and flouted by under-secretaries. I 
cannot but believe that he was out for revenge for his injured 
self-esteem, not inspired by a Jacobin frenzy for Liberty and 
Equality to be won by the way of assassination and military 
mutiny. Of such conspirators one can only say 

" &g dndXoiro teal aXKog, 8 rig roaavrd ye qe^oi." 



II 

ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD AND CATO STREET 

The man who is outside the common humanity of his own 
generation, who takes the manners, the morals, or the enthusi- 
asms of one period into another, may be magnificent or sinister, 
pathetic or grotesque. Sometimes he is all four at once. 
English history is rich in such eccentric figures, but none 
is more curious as a character study than Arthur Thistle- 
wood, the " British Jacobin," who reproduced the cheap 
humanitarianism, the reckless bloodthirstiness, the bombastic 
phraseology and the autolatrous megalomania of the Parisian 
demagogues of 1792 before the eyes of the England of Sir 
Walter Scott and Miss Austen, and who furnished the young 
Thackeray with the most gruesome anecdote of his boyhood. 
In the orthodox Whig tradition, on which nineteenth-century 
history is generally written, he is lightly passed over, and not 
without reason. For the acts of the Tory Ministers in the 
distressful years that followed Waterloo have to be decried 
wholesale, and the words and deeds of the wild fanatics, who 
frightened Liverpool and Addington into repression, have 
therefore to be kept dark — or at least relegated to short and 
vague paragraphs and footnotes. 

Arthur Thistlewood, the legitimate spiritual heir of Guy 
Fawkes, came within a measurable distance of slaying Canning 
and Wellington before their time. He had made elaborate 
preparations for parading the head of Castlereagh on a pike 
along Oxford Street and Holborn, after the slaughter of 
the whole Cabinet. Nor does it seem at all impossible that 
he might have carried out his bloody scheme. Insurrections 
may be foreseen and nipped in the bud ; on the other hand, 
assassination is a hard thing to guard against, as witness 
the fates of Alexander of Russia and Frederick Cavendish, 
of Abraham Lincoln and Sadi Carnot. The more obscure 

22 



ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 23 

and the fewer that plotters are, the more hard are they to 
discover. The very fact that Thistlewood's murderous gang 
was insignificant in numbers, and composed of unknown men, 
might have enabled him to carry out his appalling plan. 
For common prescience could not have availed to avert such 
an unlikely danger, and no victims could have been more 
helpless than a party of Ministers off duty, and dining quietly 
in a private house. But for the want of caution that led the 
arch-conspirator to broach his designs to two ill-chosen recruits, 
one of whom was a systematic traitor and the other too much 
of an honest man, he might have made Grosvenor Square 
the most tragic name in modern English history. As it was, 
he only succeeded in conferring a half-forgotten notoriety on 
Cato Street, Edgware Road. But the mere thought of what 
he might have accomplished makes the brain reel. Imagine 
Liverpool and Castlereagh, Wellington and Canning, Eldon 
and Addington — not to speak of minor figures like Vansittart, 
" Prosperity " Robinson, and Lord Bathurst — all cut off 
simultaneously by the assassins' swords and bombs. There 
would have been incendiarism and riot to follow, but it is 
certain that the affair would not have ended, as Thistlewood 
hoped, in a general rising of the lower classes of London, 
culminating in the successful proclamation of a Republic, 
with himself as " President of the Provisional Government." 
Most probably the result would have been the instant repres- 
sion of the turmoil by military force, followed by a sort of 
" White Terror." After such an atrocity the Tory Party 
would have been confirmed in power for a whole generation, 
and it must have ruled with a revengeful vigour compared 
to which Addington's and Castlereagh's measures of repres- 
sion in 1816-20 would have been child's play. There would 
certainly have been no Reform Bill in 1832. Would there 
have been an ultimate British Revolution of a very venomous 
sort some years later ? Assassination breeds repression, and 
repression breeds revolution. Let us be thankful that Mr. 
Thistlewood's caution was not equal to his energy, and to his 
compelling power as a leader of men. 

He was not young when he first came before the public 
eye. He was born in 1770, the son of one William Thistle- 



24 ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 

wood, land agent to the Vyners of Gantby, in Lincolnshire, 
a considerable county family. His father was well-to-do, 
and he received a good education : he wrote a fair eighteenth- 
century style of the turgid sort, occasionally lapsing into 
bombast — as when he spoke of " the purple stream that 
circulates through a heart enthusiastically vibrating to every 
impulse of patriotism and honour." [His own, of course.] 
But it cannot be denied that he possessed a certain eloquence 
— as witness his dying words : — 

" A few hours hence and I shall be no more : but the nightly breeze, 
which will whistle over the silent grave that shall protect me from its 
keenness, will bear to your restless pillows the memory of one who lived 
but for his country, and died when liberty and justice had been driven 
from her confines by a set of tyrants, whose thirst for blood is only 
equalled by their activity in plunder. For life, as it respects myself, 
I care not ; but, while yet I may, I would rescue my memory from the 
calumny which (I doubt not) will be industriously heaped upon it, 
when it will be no longer in my power to protect it. My every principle 
was for the prosperity of my country. The height of my ambition was 
to bring welfare to my starving fellow-citizens. I keenly felt for their 
miseries, but when their miseries were laughed at, when because they 
dared to express those miseries they were cut down by hundreds [an 
exaggerated allusion to ' Peterloo '], barbarously massacred, and 
trampled to death, when infants were sabred in their mothers' arms, 
and the breast from which they drew the tide of life was hacked from 
the parent's body, then indeed my feelings became too excessive for 
endurance, and I resolved on vengeance. I resolved that the lives of 
the instigators of massacre should atone for the souls of murdered 
innocents." 

This sounds genuine enough, when spoken on the edge 
of the grave. But though Thistlewood ended, we cannot 
doubt, as an honest fanatic, his life was no more of the idealistic 
or the Spartan type than that of many of the Jacobins whom 
he so much admired. He was always restless and thriftless. 
He was trained as a surveyor, but never took to the profession, 
and remained a burden on his father long after he had reached 
manhood. By an odd, unexplained chance he happened 
to be in Paris for some months during the Terror, and what 
he saw there of the power of the mob and the mob-leader 
remained fixed in his mind, to bear fruit in later years. But 
on his return from France he did not (as we might have expected 



ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 25 

from his later career) dabble in any of the revolutionary- 
agitations of the 'nineties. Quite the reverse — he accepted 
an ensign's commission in the 1st York Militia, and later 
(1798) became a lieutenant in the 3rd Lincoln Militia. He 
is reputed to have been an active officer and a " good drill," 
but to have been a loose liver, a persistent and unlucky gambler. 
In 1804 he courted and married a lady a good many years 
older than himself — a Miss Jane Worsley. She possessed 
a good income, and he retired from the militia and settled 
down in Lincoln to live on her money. Unfortunately for 
him she died less than eighteen months after the marriage, 
and as her property was settled on her nearest of kin in default 
of issue, Thistlewood was thrown upon the world almost 
penniless. The heirs made him a small allowance. Soon 
after he had to quit Lincoln, on account of unpaid debts of 
honour. He had continued his gambling when he had not 
the wherewithal to settle up. After a period spent in low 
water, he emerged for a moment into renewed prosperity 
— an uncle died and left him a farm valued at £10,000. He 
sold it, not for cash down, but for an annuity ; after two 
years the guarantor of the annuity went bankrupt, and his 
security disappeared. For a second time he sought salvation 
in matrimony, taking to wife Susan, daughter of Mr. John 
Wilkinson of Horncastle, a prosperous butcher. She was 
philosophic enough to accept and rear a son whom Thistle- 
wood produced — the offspring, not of his first wife, but of 
an amour. Her dowry served to stock a farm near Horn- 
castle ; and here, periodically assisted by loans from his 
father and elder brother, Thistlewood maintained himself 
more or less for some years. He was not a competent agricul- 
turist, but prices ran high in the last years of the struggle 
with Napoleon. Then came the " slump " in corn after 
the war was over, when the quarter of wheat fell from 80s. 
to 52s. in a few months. It ruined Thistlewood along with 
many other fair-weather farmers. Finding that he was 
losing rather than making money, in consequence of high 
rent and high taxes, combined with low prices for produce, 
he got rid of his farm, and came up to London in 1814 with 
his wife and his son, " not in actual want, but his finances 



26 ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 

were at a low ebb." Apparently he had sold his lease for 
something ; his wife, " a smart, genteel little woman," had 
still some resources, and both he and she probably contrived 
to extract occasional doles from their relatives in Lincoln- 
shire. What was Thistlewood's original scheme of life on 
arriving in London no man can say. But very shortly after 
his establishment there he began to appear as an agitator 
of the extreme Radical sort. He has left no account of the 
causes of his sudden launch out into politics, beyond vague 
declamation about his sympathy for the distressed and unen- 
franchised masses. This will hardly pass as an explanation : 
his previous life had not been that of a philanthropist. Vain, 
ambitious, bankrupt for the third or fourth time, soured by 
perpetual ill-luck that mainly came from his own thriftless- 
ness, he attributed his present poverty to anything rather 
than his own fault. London was seething with political dis- 
content, but it was mostly inarticulate and leaders were 
wanting. " Orator " Hunt and " Dr." Watson were certainly 
not abler men than Thistlewood : marking then notoriety, he 
evidently saw no reason why he should not rise as high. His 
tongue was ready and eloquent, his vehemence tremendous, his 
personal influence over other men was clearly exceptional ; his 
hatred for those who administered England was no doubt real 
— to them he ascribed his own indigence. He had the ruined 
gambler's grudge against all who had scraped and saved ; the 
shopkeepers of London, he once observed, were an aristocracy 
as pernicious as the Tory majority in Parliament — he should 
rejoice to see their shops looted and their tills cleared out. 
But no doubt the governing inspiration in his mind was his 
memory of the Paris of the Jacobins : he had seen what mobs 
could do when the fabric of the State was rotten, and he thought 
— not wrongly — that he himself was singularly gifted for 
a mob-leader. 

From 1816 onward he was one of the most prominent 
figures in that small band of agitators who advocated physical 
force as the remedy for all ills, and who broke completely 
away from the Whigs and their constitutional methods. He 
was heard advocating violence at every open-air meeting, 
and that his words were not vain declamation was shown by 



ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 27 

the fact that he headed an armed party at the abortive Spa 
Fields riot of December 2, 1816, and tried — carrying a tricolour 
flag and followed by a constantly dwindling crowd that finally 
melted away to nothing — to break into the Tower. He was 
tried, along with the younger Watson, for this escapade, but 
was fortunate enough to be indicted for high treason, not 
for riot : the jury acquitted them of the weightier charge, 
because they thought they ought only to have been tried 
for the lesser offence. Encouraged by his escape Thistle- 
wood continued to preach violence, till he was at last arrested 
for having sent the Home Secretary Addington (Lord Sidmouth) 
a challenge to a duel. For this he suffered a year's imprison- 
ment in Horsham Gaol [1818-19], but came out from it not 
cured of his pugnacity or his megalomania, but almost beside 
himself with long-suppressed rage. This was the summer 
of the " Manchester Massacre," the untoward affair when 
the Lancashire Yeomanry rode down a riotous assembly 
that had met to hear " Orator Hunt," where five people were 
crushed to death, and many scores more hurt by being trampled 
upon or cut about with sabres. 

Thistlewood sat in judgment upon the Ministry, and 
condemned them all to death, for what was in truth the act 
of a scared magistrate and a body of amateur soldiers, who 
had lost their heads when the mob closed around them. He 
went about London trying in vain to induce the leaders of 
the Radical Party to authorize an armed insurrection to avenge 
what he styled High Treason against the People of England. 
But no one of any weight or importance would listen to the 
proposal. Thistlewood said that if they were not cowards 
they were traitors : he believed that if he could get at the Home 
Secretary's papers in Whitehall he would find that Orator 
Hunt received a secret pension, and probably Cobbett also, 
" for all his writings, he had no doubt that he was a spy 
too." 

For months the would-be insurgent tramped the streets 
trying to organize a rising, but with small effect and ever- 
growing rage. We have a description of him at the time : 
" Five feet ten inches, with a sallow complexion, long visage, 
dark hair, a little grey ; dark hazel eyes with very arched 



28 ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 

eyebrows, a wide mouth and a good set of teeth ; he has a 
scar under his right jaw ; he is slenderly built and has the 
carriage of a military man. He usually wears a long blue 
coat and blue pantaloons . ' ' From another and most unfriendly 
source we hear that " his countenance, always forbidding, 
seemed now to have acquired an additional degree of malig- 
nancy. When in custody in 1817 for the Spa Fields affair 
he was a stout active man with a fearless and determined 
cast of features. Within the last six months he has under- 
gone a change — his countenance has grown squalid and emaci- 
ated, his dress shabby." He was generally observed walking 
— almost running — through the streets with eager impetuosity, 
his shoes and hat untidy and much worn, as if he were continu- 
ally posting about on some absorbing and interminable errand 
which brooked no delay. And, in truth, the errand existed 
— all that autumn and winter he was trying, with no great 
success, to collect the nucleus of the revolutionary army with 
which he would sweep the streets and proclaim the Republic 
at the Mansion House. As the possibility of " straight- 
forward insurrection " — his own phrase — receded farther 
and farther into the clouds, be began to vary his plans with 
schemes of mere vengeance, the murder of one or more of 
the leading Ministers — Sidmouth for choice, both as his own 
personal enemy and as the Home Secretary directly responsible 
for the " massacre " at Manchester. This was no new idea : 
it was afterwards remembered that direct incentives to assas- 
sination of individuals occurred in several of his speeches 
as far back as 1817. The statement often made, or hinted 
at, by Whig writers, to the effect that he only lapsed into 
murderous plans under the instigation of the man George 
Edwards — of whom more hereafter — has no foundation. He 
was ready for any bloody design long before he first met 
Edwards in June, 1819. 

Thistlewood sounded many scores of Radicals, great and 
small, working on, as he tested his man, from general plans 
of violence to more definite proposals for the removal of 
individual " tyrants." The large majority drew off at the 
first hint at murder. " I may be a great fool, but I was not 
foolish enough to enter into such a scheme," said one habitue 



ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 29 

of riotous meetings, when tempted by two of Thistlewood's 
acolytes. " I did not think they would ever get any persons 
to be so mad as to join them." Nevertheless, the plotter 
did, by infinite pains, succeed in collecting a small band of 
desperadoes, who did not shrink from the idea of assassination. 
There were two types among them — a minority were Jacobins 
of Thistlewood's own type, like the shoemaker Brunt, who 
acted as his second in command. This man was a prosperous 
workman, who often made 40s. or 50s. a week, and kept an 
apprentice ; he was the only one among the gang who ever 
had money in his pocket, and he readily disbursed it on " the 
cause." He was a great reader, saturated with the works 
of Tom Paine and other freethinkers, and had the whole 
vocabulary of French republicanism at his command. Unlike 
most of the others, he was neither starving nor of evil reputa- 
tion. He was as perfect a fanatic as his leader — so, it would 
appear, were one or two of the other conspirators. But 
the majority were broken men, on the edge — or over the edge 
— of starvation, whom Thistlewood had attracted by the idea 
of a general overthrow of existing society. Most of them, 
as their counsel pleaded at their trial, were probably thinking 
more of the plunder of the shops of London than of the pre- 
liminary murders that were to herald the night of pillage. 
The most violent of them was a bankrupt butcher, one James 
Ings, whose square brutal face contrasts curiously with the 
cadaverous countenances of the rest in the little gallery of 
portraits that illustrates the contemporary publications of 
1820. His ferocious language, and his grotesquely boisterous 
conduct on the scaffold, were long remembered. Down to 
1819 he had a fair record for honesty — not so the remaining 
members of the gang, who were as choice a set of scoundrels 
as could be fished from the gutter — Davidson, a plausible cant- 
ing mulatto, who had earned good money as a cabinet-maker, 
till he was expelled from a Wesleyan congregation to which 
he belonged for a series of indecent assaults on Sunday-school 
girls ; Tidd, a cobbler, whose speciality during the late war 
had been enlisting into many regiments and absconding 
with his bounty money ; Robert Adams, an old soldier, 
whom his own fellow-conspirators described as a professional 



30 ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 

swindler ; and Dwyer, who is accused of maintaining himself 
by blackmailing persons of immoral life. Thistle wood was 
not unaware of their characters — but he had to get his instru- 
ments where he could find them. Among others he took into 
his confidence George Edwards, already mentioned, a very 
clever dissolute fellow, by trade a modeller of statuettes, who 
had been much about at Radical meetings of late, and dis- 
tinguished himself by advocating outrages of an ingenious sort. 
Thistlewood described him as " poor and penniless, without 
a bed to lie upon or a chair to sit in : straw was his only bed 
— his only covering a blanket ; and, owing to his bad character 
and his swindling propensities, he was ever driven off by his 
landlords." Yet the conspirator eagerly welcomed him as 
a recruit. He was far more intelligent than most of the 
gang and full of wiles. This was Thistlewood's first mistake, 
for Edwards, though not a systematic agent provocateur of 
the Government, as many alleged at the time of the trial of 
his comrades, had earned money before by giving secret 
information to the police, and was ready to earn it again. 
We have the word of Canning himself for the fact that 
George Edwards was not a regular Government spy — he was 
not in the employment of Bow Street, nor did he receive 
an allowance. He volunteered information and got a dole 
occasionally, and he had never received any large sum till he 
earned blood-money to the tune of £1,000, when the plot was 
discovered, by betraying the whereabouts of Thistlewood. 
During the winter of 1819-20 he apparently communicated 
several times with the police or the Home Office, but could 
give them no definite information, because the plot had not 
taken shape. Thistlewood was ripe for murder, but had 
settled neither his victims nor his exact modus operandi. He 
continued collecting associates and getting together stores of 
arms — the last no easy task, because of the insufficiency of 
his exchequer. But hidden about at the lodgings of various 
conspirators were some dozens of swords, bayonets, and 
muskets, an immense number of pike-heads — some made 
of sharpened files, but quite effective — about 1,200 rounds 
of ball-cartridge, and a quantity of bombs and grenades. 
One of these was of specially large size, and calculated to 



ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 31 

produce a tremendous explosion. There was also a provision 
of fireballs for incendiary purposes. 

The plot was taking shape by January, and Thistlewood 
had fully made up his mind that the preliminary step to a 
general rising should be the murder of certain Ministers, 
whether in the street or at their offices, when his plans were 
put out by the death of the old King George III. This took 
all official persons to Windsor for some days, and disarranged 
the routine of business. It was not until February that 
things had become normal again, and Thistlewood could 
trace and mark down his intended victims. By this time he 
had come on an idea which surpassed in completeness and 
ingenuity all his previous schemes. The members of the 
Ministry were in the habit, from time to time, of dining together 
in each other's private houses in rotation at " Cabinet Dinners." 
The next was to be at the house of the Earl of Harrowby, Lord 
President of the Council, in Grosvenor Square, on the south 
side, at the corner of Charles Street, on Wednesday, February 
23. Thistlewood would thus find his " tyrants " concentrated 
in a very accessible spot, with no further guard than Lord 
Harrowby's butler and footmen. 

Having armed themselves at some convenient rendezvous, 
the conspirators were to go to Grosvenor Square in twos 
and threes, and were to disperse themselves unostentatiously 
in the neighbourhood of the Lord President's mansion. Thistle- 
wood, about the time that dinner was half over, was to knock 
at the door, carrying a red box, such as are used for ministerial 
correspondence. While he was explaining to the porter 
that a dispatch of great importance must be handed at once 
to Lord Castlereagh, other conspirators were to press in to 
the open door behind him, knock down or kill the servants 
in the hall, and rush for the dining-room. Bombs were to 
be thrown upstairs and down, and a select party were to burst 
into the dining-room and murder the guests. All this is 
undisputed, and was acknowledged by several of the con- 
spirators. Details were added by the informers at the trial 
which may or may not be correct. Thistlewood, so it is said, 
intended to present himself before the startled Ministers with 
the words : " My Lords, I have got as good men here as 



32 ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 

your Manchester Yeomanry — enter citizens and do your 
duty ! " When the killing was done, the butcher Ings was 
to cut off the heads of Sidmouth and Castlereagh, and to 
place them in two bags which he carried for the purpose. When 
the city should have risen, as Thistlewood hoped that it would, 
the heads were to be placed on pikes and carried in front of 
the mob in true Parisian style. It is certain that Ings, on 
the fatal night, carried two large bags and a butcher's knife 
— but his defenders suggested that the receptacles may have 
been for Lord Harrowby's plate rather than for Lord Castle- 
reagh's head. Who shall decide ? 

It was hoped that the news of the wholesale slaughter of 
the Cabinet would cause a general turmoil in the streets. 
This was to be helped by incendiary fires. One of Thistle- 
wood's trusted lieutenants, a man called Palin, was furnished 
with a quantity of fireballs, which he was to throw, or cause 
to be thrown, into various inflammable places, of which one, 
we are told, was the hay store of Albany Street Barracks, 
and another an old house near Furnival's Inn. He had three 
coadjutors allotted to him, but it is doubtful whether they 
would have effected much, when the signal should have been 
given on the fateful night. For Palin, according to the evi- 
dence of one of his comrades, had primed himself up for the 
business with liquor, and was quite incoherent and incapable. 
Another party, headed by a man named Cooke, was to endeav- 
our to seize the guns of the Light Horse Volunteers at their 
drill-hall in Gray's Inn Lane, and those of the Honourable 
Artillery Company. There is no proof that any serious 
force was ready at Cooke's disposal — apparently Thistlewood 
had arranged for him to be supported by some Irish labourers 
living in Gee's Court, St. Giles, with whom he was in communica- 
tion. But it is evident that his real hope was in the general 
assistance of the mob, when the news should have got about. 
If all went well, the main body of the gang, who had been 
charged with the actual assassination, were to press eastward 
along Holborn, gathering up Cooke's party with the cannon 
from Gray's Inn Road, and were to seize the Mansion House. 
Thistlewood was to install himself there as president of a 
" Provisional Government," with Ings as secretary. The 



ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 33 

proclamations which they were to post up and publish were 
duly prepared. Of what, meanwhile, the Guards and other 
troops garrisoned in London would have been doing, Thistle- 
wood does not seem to have taken account. There is no 
mention of them in the evidence of his accusers or of his 
defenders — a strange piece of reticence ! 

On Monday, February 21, Thistlewood hired as his armoury 
and as the base from which his operations were to start, an 
empty three-horse stable in Cato Street, Edgware Road. 
This obscure thoroughfare was little more than a lane or 
mews — it connected John Street and Queen Street, which 
both run into the lower end of Edgware Road on the right 
(or eastern) side. No doubt Thistlewood must have been 
fascinated with the name of Cato Street, with its suggestions 
of stern ancient Roman republicanism. But the premises 
were not imposing — three stalls and a coach-house below, a 
large loft and two small living-rooms above. They were, how- 
ever, amply sufficient as an arsenal, and thither the muskets, 
swords, pikes, and grenades were transferred from their several 
hiding-places. 

The first news concerning the final development of Thistle- 
wood's plan did not come, as might have been expected, 
from the informer Edwards, though he had given some general 
warnings, but from Thomas Hyden, a dairyman, who came 
up in great agitation to Lord Harrowby, as he was riding 
in Hyde Park on the morning of February 22, and besought 
him to put off at once his dinner of the next night, or he and 
his friends would be murdered. This person had been solicited 
on the previous Sunday to come into the plot by a man called 
Wilson, one of Thistlewood's minor satellites, and had been 
told enough to frighten him nearly out of his wits. He tried 
to catch Lord Castlereagh on the Monday, but failed to get 
access to him, though he made four calls. Wherefore he 
waylaid the Lord President- next morning, and was more 
successful. This, according to Lord Harrowby's evidence 
at the subsequent trial, was the first definite news of Cato 
Street that came to hand : " We had general information 
that some plan was in agitation, but knew neither the time 
nor the particulars." It is quite untrue to say — with some 

u.o.d. d 



34 ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 

Whig historians — that the whole matter of the dinner-party 
was settled with the spy Edwards as a trap for Thistlewood. 

But it is quite clear that later on the same day on which 
Hyden confided the matter to Lord Harrowby, Edwards gave 
similar information to Lord Sidmouth at the Home Office. 
For the Ministers by that night had private advice that they 
were to meet, not at Grosvenor Square, but at Fife House. 
The preparations for the dinner, however, were allowed to 
go on, nothing being said to Lord Harrowby's servants as 
to a countermand. Thistlewood's emissaries watched Gros- 
venor Square all day, and saw nothing to undeceive them. 

Considering that the main outlines of the plot were in the 
possession of the Home Office by eleven o'clock on Wednesday 
morning, it does not seem that the arrangements for the 
arrest of the conspirators were so well concerted as they 
should have been. The main responsibility was in the hands 
of Mr. Richard Birnie, the magistrate at Bow Street : he took 
with him for the business Ruthven, the chief of his patrol, 
and eleven others of his men only, armed with short cutlasses 
and pocket-pistols. He was informed that he should have 
military support, and relied upon it. But from an exagger- 
ated idea of the importance of keeping all preparations secret 
till the last possible hour, no definite information was given 
before evening to the Colonel commanding the 2nd Battalion 
of the Coldstream Guards, in the Portman Street Barracks, 
from which the detachment was to be drawn. At a quarter 
to eight the picket on duty was suddenly turned out and 
ordered to march : it was, by the chance of the roster, under 
Lieutenant Frederick Fitzclarence — one of the numerous 
natural sons of Wilham Duke of Clarence — who received 
at the last moment the instruction that his party — a sergeant, 
a corporal, and twenty-eight privates — were to aid the police 
in the seizure of armed conspirators in Cato Street, Edgware 
Road. The soldiers were not in the least acquainted with 
the task that they were to perform : they supposed that a 
fire had broken out, and that they were required to guard 
property from a casual mob. No guide was sent with them, 
nor was anyone from the police patrol left to pick them up. 
It was only when their officer halted them at the corner of 



ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 35 

John Street and Edgware Road, and directed them to fix 
bayonets, observe the strictest silence, and follow him with 
caution, that they became aware that something abnormal was 
in hand. They had just resumed their march and reached the 
angle of John Street and Cato Street, when they heard, quite 
clearly, a single shot, followed by a scattering volley, proceed- 
ing from a building sixty yards up the road. Whereupon 
they doubled up towards the sound, and came into the midst 
of the turmoil which had just started. 

It was, apparently, not long after eight o'clock when Mr. 
Birnie, the magistrate, gave orders to commence operations 
without waiting for the soldiers — either because he thought 
that the muster of his little band of police had been detected 
by the sentinels of the conspirators, or because the hour 
was growing so late that Thistlewood might sally out on his 
errand, before the doors of his refuge were blockaded. In 
the open street he and his gang would not so easily be arrested 
as when they were crowded together in the narrow loft above 
the stables. Accordingly Birnie gave the foolhardy order to 
his handful of followers to enter the building and seize its 
inmates, though they were known to be armed and desperate 
men, and to outnumber the attacking party by two to one. 

Birnie did not lead the assault himself, but turned over 
the charge of the forlorn hope to Ruthven, the chief of the 
patrol. The dozen police broke open the door of the stables, 
and found themselves confronted by two armed men — David- 
son, the mulatto, who had a musket across his shoulder, 
and Ings, the butcher, who had a pistol and a sword and was 
girt with the belt from which hung the gruesome bags which 
have already been mentioned. Whether from fear or from 
mere surprise, neither of the sentinels fired, but one of them 
shouted up the stairs in a thundering voice, " Look out above ! " 
Ruthven called to some of his men to seize the sentinels, and 
charged at the steep stairway with the rest. He himself 
reached the top, followed by only two officers, Ellis and 
Smithers — the rest were stumbling up the narrow ascent, 
which would only take one man abreast. The assailants 
got a momentary glimpse of the loft crowded by about twenty- 
three men, some of whom were loading pistols and muskets, 



36 ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 

others girding on swords and cutlasses. What followed 
was a matter of ten seconds : taking one step into the loft, 
Ruthven held out his staff of office and shouted, " We are 
officers — surrender your arms " ; according to one witness 
he added, " here's a pretty nest of you." The conspirators 
instinctively fell back against the walls, all save Thistle wood, 
who stood in the doorway of one of the small living-rooms 
at the end of the loft, with a long German fencing-sword 
poised in an attitude of defence. Ellis, the second patrol- 
man, who had reached the top of the stair, levelled a pistol 
at him and cried, " Drop your sword, or I fire ! " The third 
officer, Smithers, then ran in on Thistle wood, with bare hands, 
to seize him ; but the conspirator replied with a cool and 
deadly thrust which ran Smithers through the heart. The 
point of his weapon went so far that it turned against one 
of the ribs where it joined the spine. Ellis then fired at 
Thistlewood and missed him. The first shot set pande- 
monium loose ; some one cried, " Throw them downstairs," 
some one else, " Out with the lights." Four or five wild 
shots were fired upon Ruthven and Ellis, and then all was 
dark, for the eight candles were overturned, and the gang 
plunged in a mass at the head of the stairway, to get loose 
from the trap in which they found themselves. The two 
surviving patrolmen were knocked head over heels down the 
steps, and the conspirators poured down after them and fell 
upon the eight or nine officers who had not yet mounted. 
There was a clash for a few seconds — about twenty shots 
were fired, and then the gang broke out successfully, after 
wounding five of the police — one was shot through the head, 
but not mortally. As they charged forth they liberated 
their two sentinels, Ings and Davidson. The whole started 
to run in the narrow street — right and left. Those who 
turned to their right, to the smaller exit into Queen Street, 
got off, including Thistlewood himself, who, as he ran, made 
a furious stroke at a harmless passer-by, one William Samson, 
whom he mistook for an enemy trying to intercept him. The 
man, fortunately for himself, was wearing an unbuttoned 
greatcoat — the sword caught in the folds and did him no 
harm. The less lucky portion of the gang, who had swerved 



ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 37 

to the left, towards John Street, ran into the arms of the 
Coldstreamers, who were hurrying up at the sound of the 
firing. These were mostly caught, some of them fighting hard. 
Tidd, when seized by the sergeant of the picket, fired on him 
— the ball went up his sleeve and then grazed his temple. 
Lieutenant Fitzclarence had a scuffle with another, who 
cut at him with a sword and then wrestled with him, till he 
was dragged off by two privates. When all the alarms and 
excursions were over, the Bow Street officers searched the 
loft, and found there not only the corpse of Smithers, but 
two miserable wretches who had buried themselves in a heap 
of shavings and straw in the corner, being too terrified to 
flee. One of these, a little snub-nosed Irish tailor named 
Moniment, was the second of the two conspirators who was 
allowed to turn king's evidence : the other was a starving 
wastrel named Gilchrist, who had only been brought into 
the conspiracy that same evening — literally gleaned from 
the gutter. So ended the skirmish with the capture of only 
eight of the twenty-five persons who had been present at the 
meeting — Ings, Wilson, Tidd, Davidson the mulatto, Brad- 
bourn, Shaw, Gilchrist, and Moniment. 

On the next day three more important arrests were made, 
those of Robert Adams, the old guardsman, Brunt, the shoe- 
maker-politician, and Thistlewood himself. The latter was 
certainly taken by the treachery of his accomplice Edwards, 
the spy, for he had never returned to his own abode, but 
had taken refuge in an obscure lodging-house, 8 White Street, 
Little Moorfields. No one but Edwards had accompanied 
him thither, or knew of his hiding-place. He was surprised 
in bed, with all his clothes on but his coat and boots, sleeping 
the sleep of exhaustion after his wild night's work. Being, 
as he thought, safe where he was not known, he had taken 
no precautions against surprise, and was pounced upon by 
six Bow Street officers beforeiie could even cast off his blankets. 
Several other arrests were made that day of persons, some 
of whom had, and some had not, any real connexion with 
the plot. 

The prisoners were in a very evil case. This was a hanging 
job — if not a hanging, drawing, and quartering job — as they 



38 ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 

all knew. There would be no chance of getting off lightly, 
on the plea that their assembly was a foolish escapade with 
no deadly purpose behind it. That they had been betrayed 
by some one deep in the affair was evident, for the Cato 
Street stable had only been hired two days before the affray. 
The traitor — whoever he might be — would know all about 
the projected assassination, the fire-raising, the design for 
seizing the cannon, and the rest. Wherefore the fanatics, 
such as Thistlewood, Brunt, and Ings, despaired and raged. 
But the meaner spirits, who had joined in the plot for plunder, 
began to think of the chance of turning king's evidence and 
saving their necks. It might well be that the Home Office 
had not sufficient detailed information to make out a complete 
case, and would be glad of more. Within a few hours several 
of the conspirators were sounding their jailers as to the chance 
of escape by the way of confession. This is generally the 
case when a gang of political plotters has been captured, 
as Irish experience shows. After the Phoenix Park murders 
not only Councillor Carey, but others of the murderers — some 
say the majority of them — tried to buy their lives by treachery 
at their comrades' expense. 

Now the Government had at their disposal for direct evi- 
dence only Thomas Hyden, who had honestly given infor- 
mation the moment that the general scope of the plot had 
become clear to him, and who knew no more than outlines, 
and the odious Edwards — whose part in the affair they would 
gladly minimize, since the revelation of his long and hypo- 
critical spying into the projects of Thistlewood would disgust 
public opinion. He had let the plan develop, had loudly 
commended it, and had suggested ingenious, if futile, addi- 
tions. If he could be kept out of court altogether, the pro- 
secution would be the better for it. Wherefore tacit offers 
of immunity were made to two of the would-be purveyors 
of king's evidence — Robert Adams the old soldier and the 
Irish tailor Moniment. The former had been very early 
and deep in the conspiracy ; the other knew less, but was 
a special recruit of Brunt, Thistlewood's chief lieutenant, 
and could tell all about him. To corroborate the evidence 
of these two worthies there was an ample amount of out- 



ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 39 

side witnesses, neighbours who had seen mysterious meetings 
and secret stores of arms, and people who, like Thomas Hyden, 
had been solicited in more or less open fashion to take a 
hand in what (following the phraseology of the South Sea 
Bubble) we may call " an undertaking of great advantage, 
to be presently divulged." It was accordingly resolved 
to keep Edwards in the background, and to rely in the pro- 
secution on the evidence of Hyden, Adams, and Moniment, 
supported by the immense quantity of small detailed facts 
that could be supplied by persons whom chance had brought 
into contact with the conspirators. After all, it was impos- 
sible for them to explain away the muskets and swords, the 
1,200 rounds of ball-cartridge, and the explosive bombs which 
had been found in their hands. The easy suggestion that 
the whole matter was a " massacre," an unprovoked attack 
by the minions of Bow Street, could hardly stand in face 
of the fact that the patrolmen had lost one killed and five 
wounded, not to speak of two soldiers slightly hurt, while 
none of the prisoners could show more than a few bruises. 
They made the most of them. Ings complained that he 
had actually been " collared and beaten about the head 
with a constable's staff, so that it swelled most dreadfully." 
For an innocent being armed with a cutlass, a pistol, and a 
large butcher's knife, this was indeed unmerited brutality. 
The actual trial of the conspirators took place fifty days 
after their arrest. The affray in Cato Street had happened 
at eight on the night of February 23. The inquest on Smithers, 
with verdict of wilful murder against Arthur Thistlewood, 
ten more persons named, and " others unknown," had been 
held on the 25th. On March 2 the prisoners were brought 
before the Privy Council and examined, with the result 
that a " Special Commission of Oyer and Terminer " was 
issued for their trial, both for high treason and for the murder 
of Smithers and the wounding of certain other persons. On 
March 27 the Middlesex Grand Jury found true bills for high 
treason against Thistlewood and ten other prisoners, and 
for murder against Thistlewood and five more, who had 
been in the loft where Smithers was killed. Davidson and 
Ings, the two sentries, who had been below at the time, were 



40 ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 

not included in this charge, nor were several others of the 
gang. The names of the two approvers, Adams and Moni- 
ment, did not appear in either list — a sign that they were 
to be utilized for King's evidence. 

On April 15 eleven prisoners appeared at the Sessions 
House, Old Bailey, for trial. These were Thistlewood, Brunt, 
Davidson, Ings, Tidd, and six minor figures, Wilson, Harrison, 
Bradbourn, Strange, Cooper, and Gilchrist. Besides the two 
informers, two persons who had taken a considerable part 
in the plot were missing from the dock — Palin, who had 
been in charge of the incendiary department of the business, 
and Cooke, who was to have led the party which was told 
off to seize the cannon in the Gray's Inn Road. They had 
succeeded in disappearing ; much activity of Bow Street 
Runners, and the offer of handsome rewards, had failed to 
produce them, and they never were seen again : probably 
they had slipped away from London within a few hours of 
the affray. Of the twenty-five who had met in Cato Street 
on February 23, some ten or eleven got off undiscovered ; 
but, so far as the evidence of the two approvers went, they 
were mostly mere " supers " in the drama. The only one 
who rouses any interest in the reader of the trial is a person, 
unknown by name to both Adams and Moniment, " a big 
man in a long brown overcoat," whom they had never seen 
before ; he had addressed the gang on the fatal evening. 
" They were there to serve their country, and if anyone was 
afraid of his life, he ought to have nothing to do with a con- 
cern like this — the one thing to beware of was drunkenness, 
which would be ruinous to a cause like theirs." He was clearly 
an earnest recruit for the plot, but a late comer, since two 
men deep in the matter did not know his name. 

The eleven prisoners were arraigned together. Some 
little delay was caused by Ings refusing to plead in the usual 
form that he would be tried " by God and his country." He 
wanted to substitute " by the laws of Reason " — a fine French 
touch, though he was no doubt borrowing from Tom Paine, 
and not from any foreign source. All duly answered " Not 
guilty," whereupon Lord Justice Abbott announced that 
Thistlewood was to be tried by himself, and the others in 



ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 41 

succession. As things fell out, the chief, Ings, and Brunt 
had separate trials : Tidd and Davidson the mulatto agreed 
to take their fortune together : the remaining six were dealt 
with in a group. The whole chain of five trials was spread 
over fourteen days, from Saturday, April 15, the morning of 
the arraignment, to Friday, April 28, when sentence was 
delivered to all the accused together. 

The main psychological interest of the trials consists in 
the curious attitude taken by the prisoners as the case against 
them was slowly worked out. A conspirator has it open to 
him to plead one of two things — either he is a " martyr," 
that is, he acknowledges his intent and glories in it, or he is 
a " victim," an innocent man who is accused by perjured 
villains of being concerned in a plot of which he knew nothing, 
or which never even existed. Each of these poses is excellent 
in its way, but in strict logic they are incompatible with 
each other. One cannot be both an unjustly-accused innocent 
man and also the martyr of a great cause. Revolutionaries 
on their trial have often failed to see this simple fact, and 
claim both merits for themselves. At one moment they 
are the prey of lying and corrupt witnesses, and make appeals 
to the immutable laws of justice ; at another they slide into 
a vindication of the crime of which they are accused, and 
boast of their share in it, as a supreme title to respect from 
their countrymen. This confusion of poses was very evident 
both in Thistlewood's own defence and in that of several of 
his followers. Instead of endeavouring to prove that the 
Cato Street meeting was harmless, or the whole plot an inven- 
tion of the police and the Government, they spent a vast 
amount of time and energy in discrediting the character of 
the witnesses brought against them. Adams and Moni- 
ment were traitors, and a traitor should not be credited — 
even (apparently) if his allegations are borne out by innumer- 
able scraps of corroborating evidence from sources which 
cannot be impugned. Butfthe most telling part of the defence 
was an attempt to throw all the responsibility for the plot 
on to the shoulders of the invisible Edwards. There is good 
reason to think that this was a policy settled among the accused 
from the first. Moniment was a miserable little coward, 



42 ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 

but there seems every probability that he was telling the 
truth when he said that Thistlewood instructed him to this 
effect on the day after their arrest, and long before the trial 
had begun. " I was handcuffed to him : he advised me 
when I came up to say that I had been brought to Cato Street 
by Edwards. I asked him how I could say so, when I had 
never seen such a man as Edwards in all my life " — it was 
Brunt who enlisted him. " Thistlewood said that was of 
no consequence. If asked what sort of a man he was, I was 
to say that he was a little taller than myself, and dressed 
that night in a brown coat." I fancy that from this hint 
we can reconstruct the reason why Edwards is always turning 
up in the statements of the prisoners, even in improbable 
conjunctions, and why either he or Adams is credited by them 
with the more startling and atrocious proposals. They even 
said that Edwards invented the plot himself — which, consider- 
ing Thistlewood's previous record, is absurd. " He knew 
all th.e plans for two months before I was acquainted with 
them," cried Ings. " I am like a bullock drove into Smith- 
field market to be sold. I consider myself murdered if this 
man is not brought forward : I am willing to die on the scaffold 
if he goes there too. And that man Adams has got out of 
the halter himself by accusing others falsely : he would hang 
his God. / would sooner die five hundred deaths than be 
the means of hanging other men." But the falsehoods attri- 
buted to Adams, when the accused went into details, turned 
out not to be misdescriptions of the character of the plot 
but errors as to the names of people present on different 
occasions, or as to the number of candles in the loft on February 
23, or the attribution of words to one rather than another 
of the conspirators. 

But, in fact, all attempts to malign the character of witnesses 
— which was in several cases bad enough — were useless in 
face of the mere facts of the affray. The prosecution had 
the easy answer : "If these men were persons of abominable 
character, if one is a professional blackmailer, another a 
notorious swindler, a third ' a villain of the deepest atrocity 
— his very landlord refuses to give him a character,' how came 
it that you were, as you acknowledge yourselves, associating 



ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 43 

with them for weeks and months in the greatest familiarity ? " 
It was a case of noscitur a sociis. 

The counsel for the prisoners — there were four of them, 
Messrs. Adolphus, Curwood, Walford, and Broderick — had 
an unenviable task because of the way in which their clients 
persisted in " giving themselves away." Adolphus, the leader 
for the defence in Thistlewood's case, spent the greater part 
of his energy in trying to demonstrate that the conspirators 
could not be guilty of high treason, because their means 
were insufficient to attack the fabric of the English Monarchy. 

"It is unworthy of the Government of this country to prosecute as 
traitors some dozen ragged beggars impatient of extreme poverty. 
Barracks were to be taken, cannons carried off, Ministers assassinated, 
the Mansion House occupied, by some fifteen or twenty men — twenty- 
five was the highest number that is spoken to. He believed that the 
real object of the party was mere robbery — they might set fire to some 
houses to obtain plunder in the confusion that might thereby be created. 
These, to be sure, were heinous intentions, but they did not amount to 
high treason. The Jury had heard the manner in which some of the 
prisoners spoke of the shopkeepers of London — it showed their object 
was plunder, and the bags produced were made for the purpose of hold- 
ing spoil, not the heads of Cabinet Ministers." 

All this, though ingenious enough, must have been most 
distasteful to Thistlewood, who objected to being degraded 
from the position of a patriot chief to that of the head of a 
gang of burglars. The pains of the barristers were wasted 
for a client whose exposition of his situation was as follows : — 

" With respect to the immorality of our project, I will observe that 
the assassination of a tyrant has always been deemed a meritorious 
action. Brutus and Cassius were lauded to the very skies for slaying 
Caesar. Indeed, when any man, or set of men, place themselves above 
the laws of their country, there is no other means of bringing them to 
justice but the arm of the private individual. If the laws are not strong 
enough to prevent them from murdering the community, it becomes 
the duty of every member of that community to rid his country of its 
oppressors. High treason was committed against the people at Man- 
chester. If one spark of honour, one spark of patriotism, had still 
glimmered in the breasts of Englishmen, they would have risen to a 
man — insurrection had become a public duty. The banner of inde- 
pendence should have floated in the gale that brought the tidings of the 
wrongs and sufferings of the Manchester people to the metropolis. Such 



44 ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 

was not the case : Albion is still in the chains of slavery — I quit it 
without regret — my body may be immured beneath the soil whereon I 
first drew breath. My only sorrow is that this soil should be the theatre 
for despots, for slaves, for cowards ! " 

Translated into Brunt's less flowery style, the same senti- 
ments appear in the following form : — 

"Lord Castlereagh and Lord Sidmouth had an antipathy for the 
people, and if he did conspire to murder them, was that high treason ? 
He readily acknowledged that he had agreed to assassinate the Ministers, 
but he was no enemy to his country. He was an enemy to a borough- 
mongering faction, which equally enslaved King and People. He had 
joined the conspiracy for the public good. They might quarter his 
body, they might inflict on him any kind of torture, but they could not 
shake his resolution or subdue his spirit." 

Ings, an uneducated man, and not a great reader like Brunt, 
spoke only a few words, but they made the same point. 

" His Majesty's Ministers conspire together and impose laws to starve 
me and my family and my fellow-countrymen. And if I was going to 
assassinate these Ministers, I do not see that it is so bad as starvation. 
The Yeomen at Manchester had their swords ground — and I had a 
sword ground too. I do not see any harm in that. I would rather die 
like a man than live like a slave." 

Not all the accused spoke up like this. Davidson, the 
mulatto, mainly harped away on the infamy of Edwards, 
though he raised a curious constitutional point. In Magna 
Charta it was provided that if the King violated the terms 
he had sworn to observe, the barons might rise in arms against 
him. 

" Such an act in old times was not considered treason towards the 
King, however hostile it might be towards his Ministers. But this does 
not apply to me — I had no intention of joining any scheme whatever, 
either to put down my King or to murder his Ministers. I have been 
entrapped by those who, for private purposes of their own, have had my 
life sworn away." 

Several others of the less notable conspirators said no more 
than they had been drawn into the plot by villains, or that 
all the evidence against them had been perverted. 

In every case the successive Juries of the five trials brought 
in verdicts of guilty. It is hard to see how they could have 



ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 45 

done otherwise. The sentences of all the conspirators were 
delivered together by Lord Chief-Justice Abbott. In form 
the death penalty was passed on all : but the judge, while 
rehearsing it, held out hopes that some of the condemned 
men might look for mercy. Within twenty -four hours it 
was intimated that only five — Thistlewood, Brunt, Ings, 
Davidson, and Tidd — were to die : Harrison, Wilson, Cooper, 
Strange, and Bradbourn were sentenced to lifelong transpor- 
tation to New South Wales. Gilchrist was respited and 
afterwards given a pardon — inquiry had proved that he had 
never met Thistlewood before the night of the affray, that 
he was absolutely starving, and had been brought to the 
fatal meeting by Cooper on the promise of a meal. It was 
doubtful whether he had ever understood what was in hand. 
At the last moment the conspirators had absolutely raked the 
gutters for recruits. 

The kind of execution by which the five men condemned 
to death perished was a curious compromise between old and 
modern forms. They were hung till they were dead, and their 
corpses were then beheaded. The idea that decapitation was the 
proper punishment for high treason still lingered, but sentiment 
and public opinion had so far changed since the great execu- 
tions of 1746 that death by the axe was not enforced, and the 
horrid ritual of quartering was completely abandoned. Colonel 
Despard and his gang in 1803 had been hanged and then 
decapitated, as we have already seen. All the prisoners 
showed great resolution during the three days that they had 
still to live. Thistlewood, Brunt, Ings, and Tidd refused 
to see any minister of religion, declaring themselves Deists, 
and strenuously rejecting the notion that they needed any 
man's intercession before the Supreme Being. Davidson first 
sent for a Wesleyan preacher, and afterwards accepted the 
ministrations of the Ordinary of Newgate. He showed 
great contrition, received the sacrament, and spent his last 
hours in almost unceasing bursts of agonized prayer. On 
the scaffold he displayed as much courage as any of the other 
four. 

The execution, which took place on a specially prepared 
platform of unusual size erected in front of the Old Bailey 



46 ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 

Sessions House, took place at a quarter to eight on the morn- 
ing of May 1. The crowd assembled was the largest that 
London had seen for many years — perhaps the largest that 
had ever gathered to such a scene, for the metropolis had 
doubled in size since the Jacobite rebels went to the block 
in 1746. Executions of highwaymen, murderers, or forgers 
were common enough, but this was to be something out of 
the ordinary : " Colonel Despard's job " in 1803, and Belling- 
ham's hanging in 1812, could not compare with it for notoriety. 
But the precautions taken by the Government rendered 
the proceedings orderly enough — there was a large display 
of constables, and a force of soldiery, horse and foot, was on 
guard to repress possible rioting. To prevent people from 
being crushed by the swaying of the multitude, successive 
barriers of posts, bars, and chains had been put across the 
open space before the Sessions House and the streets that 
converged on it. Thus the spectators were cut up into a 
sort of " water-tight compartments," each block separated 
from the others. The early comers took their posts over- 
night, and whiled away the time of waiting by watching the 
carpenters erect the scaffold by torchlight. It was finished 
by dawn. At five o'clock in the morning the spaces from 
which there was a view were completely packed, including 
the roofs of houses for many hundred yards away in all direc- 
tions. The reporters of the day remark that it was astounding 
that no accidents of any importance took place in such a 
vast crowd. Some people were, of course, taken with fits or 
fainting ; a line of men clinging to a light iron railing by 
St. Sepulchre's Church brought it down by their weight, and 
fell on the people below them, but no one got more than 
bruises. 

The fact was that it is strong emotion — anger or fear — 
that makes crowds dangerous, and this multitude had come 
together merely to see a show. 

" The conduct of the countless thousands assembled," writes an eye- 
witness, " was peaceable in the extreme. Curiosity seemed powerfully 
excited, but no political feeling was manifested by any part of the 
crowd, and they awaited the termination of the dreadful scene in 
silence. Sometimes a low murmur ran through the multitude as some 



ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 47 

new incident in the proceedings attracted their attention, but it was a 
murmur of surprise and interest, which never took the tone of clamorous 
disapprobation. ' ' 

At the very last moment of the execution there was a horrid 
outburst of levity among some of the spectators, which must 
be described in its due place. 

At a quarter before eight the prisoners made their appear- 
ance on the scaffold, led by Thistlewood. The bearing of 
the chief and of Brunt and Tidd was stern and self-contained : 
Davidson kept muttering prayers all the time of waiting. 
But Ings created an unseemly disturbance : he kept singing 
for some time in a discordant voice one of the Reformers' 
songs, " Oh, give me death or liberty," till Tidd turned to 
him and said, " Don't, Ings. There is no use in all this noise ; 
we can die bravely without being noisy." This only made 
the wretched butcher colloquial instead of musical. He kept 
up a fire of loud observations, advising the hangman to " Do 
it well, pull us tight." He nodded to people in the crowd, 
observing that " he saw a good many friends about." He 
shouted to them, " Here I go, James Ings, the enemy of 
tyrants," and, again, " This is soon going to be the last remains 
of James Ings." At the final moment, after turning to Jack 
Ketch and shouting, " Now, old gentleman, finish me tidily," 
he looked toward the crowd and, leaning forward, roared out 
three distinct cheers in a hoarse and broken voice. Thistle- 
wood ignored him : his only recorded utterance on the scaffold 
was that he said to Tidd just before the platform fell, " Now 
we shall soon know the Great Secret." 

After the trap had worked, the conspirators were left 
hanging for half an hour. Their bodies were then lifted into 
their coffins, with the heads hanging over the upper ends. 
The decapitation followed. A masked man in a blue coat 
and grey trousers came on to the scaffold and severed each 
head with a knife, not an axe. 1 When he had dealt with each 

1 I received a curious piece of information concerning this knife from 
the venerable Sir George Higginson only last summer (July, 1922). 
His father, an officer of the Guards, belonging to the company which 
was held in reserve inside Newgate, was asked to breakfast with the 
Governor of the prison after the execution. While they were at table 



48 ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD 

corpse the assistant executioner held up the head by its hair, 
and proclaimed to the assembled multitude, " This is the head 
of a traitor," in the ancient style. The crowd at first disliked 
the horrid sight : as Thistlewood's head was cut off many 
averted their eyes and others groaned. They looked with 
more steadiness at the decapitation of Tidd, Ings, and David- 
son, some hooting and hissing at the operator. But when 
the turn of Brunt's corpse came a hateful incident followed. 
Thackeray related it as the most horrid story that had reached 
his ears when he was a boy. The masked man, on rising from 
his stooping position over the coffin, dropped the head, which 
rolled across the sawdust. Some brute in the crowd cried 
out, " Yah, butterfingers ! " and a number of others about 
him burst out into a horse-laugh. 

It is said that the impression made by this hideous mirth 
on the rest of the spectators, and the report of it to the authori- 
ties, was the cause of the abolition of the ceremony of decapita- 
tion, which has never since been seen in England. Later 
traitors have always been merely hanged. Probably some 
general readers remember the Cato Street conspirators mainly 
because they were the last criminals on whom the ancient 
ritual of decapitation was carried out. 

an excited official came in, and had a whispered conversation with the 
Governor. He soon departed, taking off the large carving-knife from 
the sideboard : Jack Ketch had forgotten to bring his full equipment of 
necessary tools ! 



Ill 

RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR* 

For the first two years of the Great War part of my work 
was in Whitehall, where every morning I took up my blue 
pencil, as one of the much-cursed tribe of Censors. Those 
days now seem a long way off : I am not going to talk of the 
" secrets of the prison house," which indeed have now lost 
the greater part of their interest. It might be tedious to 
say what one thought of war-correspondents and war-orators, 
publicists, journalists, and propagandists, domestic and 
foreign, enemy and ally, their psychology and their methods. 
But I made some notes on a subject of general historical 
interest, which was always coming up during the Great War, 
though one had thought that the times and conditions were 
so changed that it would never emerge again as a practical 
phenomenon worthy of serious notice. I allude to the genesis 
and development of Rumours, Reports, and Legends of a false 
or exaggerated sort, during times of military or political 
crisis. The topic is enormous : two considerable volumes, 
I believe, have been written of late by a French publicist 
on " Les fausses nouvelles de la Guerre." My own object is 
no more than to illustrate the psychology of Rumour, from 
incidents that occurred during the eventful years 1914-1918. 

Between history previous to the nineteenth century and 
that of the last three generations, there is, in this province 
of research, one essential dividing point — the introduction 
of the Electric Telegraph, which not only made the trans- 
mission of true information infinitely more rapid, but also 
secured the contradiction of false information within a reason- 
ably short space of time. In the days of the Greeks and 
Romans, or the Middle Ages, an immense lie about events 

1 This essay was delivered in its original shape as an address to the 
Royal Historical Society on February 14, 1918. 

U.C.D. 49 E 



50 RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 

in a remote corner of the world might have free currency 
for months : one about events only two or three hundred 
miles away might remain uncontradicted for many days. 
Even a highly organized system of posts, such as prevailed 
in the Roman Empire, and in a less degree in the ancient 
Persian Empire and the thirteenth-century Mongol Empire, 
worked in a comparatively slow fashion, and in time of trouble 
served less usefully than one might have expected, because 
the public was naturally and rightly suspicious of official 
communiques. A Persian king or a Roman emperor could 
not be expected to give sincere and full information about 
palace conspiracies or provincial rebellions, for the benefit 
of his discontented subjects in distant corners of his realm : 
and the public was well aware of the fact. On the other hand, 
private letters not given to a Government messenger would 
naturally travel slowly, and if wars or civil strife were preva- 
lent, would not arrive at all, or arrive after unconscionable 
delays. Hence Rumour, ^HMH, the Fama that Virgil 
describes, with her myriad eyes and her myriad tongues, 
had a scope and a surviving power that seemed absurd to us 
a few years ago, in the quiet days before the Great War, when 
we wrote facile platitudes about the credulity of our prede- 
cessors in the Elder World, at which, in view of certain wild 
days of the recent war-years, we feel that we must no longer 
scoff. 

The old-fashioned rumour was generally " tendencious," 
I.e. bore witness to a psychological state of expectation of 
certain desired or dreaded events, and declared that they 
had actually taken place. A fine example is the story of 
Herodotus about the " divine rumour " which ran round the 
Greek confederate fleet at Mycale in 479 B.C., that " on this 
day the allies have achieved a decisive victory over the Per- 
sians in Boeotia." It happened to be true — but was no doubt 
merely the reflection of a reasoned expectation of such a victory. 
May we not add as a similar case the story of the sage Apol- 
lonius Tyanseus, who exclaimed one day in the market-place 
of Ephesus that the tyrant Domitian was being at that very 
moment assassinated in Rome ? He said he had a vision 
of the scene, but was it not the realization of a rational expecta- 



RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 51 

tion ? I found a most curious parallel to this story of Apol- 
lonius in a modern Serbian book. On the day when Prince 
Michael Obrenovitch was murdered at Belgrade, a certain 
peasant supposed to be gifted with second sight cried out in 
the market-place of Ujitza, some 100 miles away, that " they 
are slaying the good prince." When the news of the sad event 
arrived next day, he was arrested as a possible accomplice 
of the conspirators, but was released on being found to be a 
respectable person with no possible connexion with them. 
The whole tale of Matthew of Kremna may be found at length 
in Chedomil Mijatovitch's Reminiscences of a Balkan Dip- 
lomatist, with some documentary evidence subjoined. 

But ^>HMH was not infallible either in ancient or in modern 
days, as witness such incidents as the false tale that the Turks 
had been completely defeated at Kossovo in 1389, which 
led to bells being rung in Notre Dame and congratulatory 
letters drafted in Italy — and as a very modern case the rumour 
that Sebastopol had fallen early in September, 1854, which 
had achieved such substantial verisimilitude at Vienna that 
it was telegraphed on officially to London, and led to the 
firing of the Park Guns for victory — followed by sad disillu- 
sionment in a few days, when no confirmation could be got 
from the East. Both of these were incidents that might 
very conceivably have occurred in fact, and can best 
be explained by a mere false prophecy on the part of public 
opinion, without there having been any dishonest and deliberate 
intention on anyone's part. 

Of course, such fraudulent intent, in rumours deliberately 
started, is not unknown, though I think much rarer than 
the other source of error. Good examples are the story that 
Napoleon had perished in the Moscow Retreat, put about 
by General Malet as the preliminary of his hair-brained coup 
d'etat in November, 1812, which nearly gave him possession 
of Paris. This was a political lie. The more sordid form 
of the " tendencious " rumour, the Stock Exchange lie, seems 
to have had its first elaborate specimen some eighteen months 
later. In March, 1 8 1 4, a group of financial operators in London, 
who had speculated on the early collapse of Napoleon's defen- 
sive fight in Champagne, found themselves about to be ruined 



52 RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 

on settling day, and worked out a most detailed imposture. 
They sent a bogus Russian officer to land from a smack at 
Dover, with news that the Emperor was defeated and slain, 
while the semaphores were set working to the same effect, 
and a separate party of supposed French officers drove through 
London with the same news. The speculators were thus 
enabled to sell out without being ruined, but were easily 
detected by the utilization of the principle of cui bono. Who 
had profited by the rumour ? Obviously those who had sold 
out, at once and without hesitation, at its first circulation, 
and had not waited for the further rise in all stocks which 
would undoubtedly have come had the news of the Emperor's 
death been confirmed. The incident is best remembered 
because the famous naval hero, Lord Cochrane, was convicted, 
whether justly or not, along with his uncle and his uncle's 
partner, as having been concerned in the putting about of 
the ingenious fiction. The case is notable as being both early 
and elaborate ; later " stock-exchange flams " might be quoted 
by the dozen, but are by no means so interesting. 

The sort of false rumours that I have been quoting hitherto 
were all concerned with matters of high political or military 
import. But the Middle Ages were no less rife in popular 
fictions which were purely anecdotal, marvellous, or intended 
to act as moral warnings. Tales of ghosts, devils, or impos- 
sible natural phenomena, of awful instances of divine judg- 
ment on criminals, heretics, or blasphemers, used to pass 
freely from mouth to mouth, and sometimes even to get 
enshrined in a chronicle by some credulous writer greedy 
of anecdotes. For the sort of thing that would nowadays 
appear among the " short paragraphs " of a penny news- 
paper would in the thirteenth century have appealed to the 
less severe type of chronicler. The parallels of the gigantic 
strawberry or the five-ounce hen's-egg of to-day were such 
fails divers as an apparition of the devil in Essex, or the swal- 
lowing up by the earth of a woman at Newbury who was 
adding appeals to God to rank perjury. If the spot in which 
the incident was placed was sufficiently remote from the 
chronicler's abode, the story might get down in black and 
white. The length of time for which some of these legends 



RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 53 

passed current is extraordinary. They emerge substan- 
tially identical in outline, but with locality and name and 
date changed, at very long intervals, and in very different 
parts of Europe. They were still strong in the seventeenth 
century, and I should not like to say that they altogether 
died out in the eighteenth. They were the parents of many 
ballads and chap-books. 

But to resume the main thread of my thesis. The improve- 
ment of internal communications, and the spread all over 
the civilized parts of Europe of a system of public vehicles, 
stage-coaches, diligences, etc., was a severe blow to the pro- 
longed life of rumours. So was the introduction of the sema- 
phore system of long-distance signalling, which enabled Paris 
to communicate with Strasbourg, or London with Dover in 
an hour or two. But semaphores were slow in working, so 
that only very short and important messages could be passed ; 
and they were also liable to be held up, not only for hours 
but even for days, in times of fog, mist, or rain, when it became 
impossible to see one station on the line from the next, so 
that the working of its lights by night, or its arms by day, 
could not be verified across the many miles of space which 
always divided one semaphore from another. 

The real death-blow to the long currency of rumours was 
only dealt in the middle years of the nineteenth century by 
the introduction of the Electric Telegraph, which (unlike the 
semaphore) was absolutely independent of weather and light ; 
and was also much more quickly operated. In normal times 
of peace, and in civilized countries, it enabled news to be 
circulated or contradicted in a few minutes over many thou- 
sands of miles. All Europe was ere long bound up in its 
network, the great expansion being between 1840 and 1850. 
The first submarine cable to France was laid in 1851, and soon 
the cable reached all save remote and unprogressive coun- 
tries like Turkey. In 1854, when the false rumour of the 
fall of Sebastopol mentioned above was circulated, the only 
reason for which it was possible at so late a date was that the 
wires went no farther than Austria, and had not yet been 
extended across the Danube or to Constantinople. But it 
was not till twelve years later that long-distance submarine 



54 RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 

cables were first laid, so that America was still out of touch 
for anything from ten days to a fortnight. However, after 
one signal failure in 1857 the permanent Atlantic cable was 
laid in 1866. Its first notable success, as a transmitter of 
news outrunning the swiftest steamer, was the arrest of the 
notorious railway murderer, Miiller, the Crippen of his day, 
who had thought himself safe when he took ship at Liverpool 
for New York, but forgot that the newly -laid wire would have 
warned the American police to be ready for him a fortnight 
before his liner came in. 

There was only one limit to the news -circulating and 
rumour-destroying power of the Electric Telegraph, and that 
was the Censor in time of war. It soon became obvious 
that free transmission of military intelligence by war-corres- 
pondents and others across the wire, into neutral countries, 
might be most pernicious to the army whose movements 
were being reported. The cardinal instance of this is said 
to have occurred in the Franco-German War of 1870, where 
early news that MacMahon's army was marching from Chalons 
northward, heading for Sedan, is said to have reached the 
German head-quarters staff long before it could have been 
obtained by cavalry reconnaissance or other military methods. 
A war-correspondent had been allowed to pass some suggestive 
details practically implying a march in that direction to Brus- 
sels, from whence German agents telegraphed them to Moltke 
without delay. Hence came, according to the current story, 
the disaster of Sedan : for the French would not necessarily 
have been surromided and cornered if their adversaries had 
not received an incredibly early indication of their move. 

The artificial closing of the telegraphic communication, 
normal in time of peace, by the censorship of all parties, 
gave Rumour a new lease of life in time of war. It was quite 
impossible before 1914 to guess how long and vigorous that 
lease of life might be. Who would have believed that for 
a whole week Europe would be ignorant of whether Kerensky 
or the Bolsheviks were in possession of Petrograd, while 
both had their reasons for not sending out full intelligence ? 
The result was the setting forth of elaborate circumstantial 
rumours from Stockholm and Copenhagen concerning the 



RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 55 

details of the triumph of each side, all of which had many 
days' currency before the real facts came out. Again, early 
in February, 1918, it was wholly impossible to make out 
from the censored telegraphic dispatches of both sides whether 
the Rada or the Bolsheviks were in possession of Kieff. When 
rival censors are at work, both having tendencious purposes, 
and neither any regard for the truth, the golden age of the 
unofficial rumour has come again. 

I can just remember the similar phenomenon which pre- 
vailed during the Franco -German War of 1870-1, when 
rumours had a mighty vogue. They were generally of an 
optimistic nature and from French sources. The putters- 
about of them always pretended to have good news, which 
the censor was holding back for some occult military reason. 
The majority of them had reference to the siege of Paris — 
the garrison had broken out, or one of the German covering 
armies had been completely defeated. 

It must of course be remembered that so long as telegraphic 
news was absolutely dependent on the wire, all besieged 
cities were out of touch with their friends in the distance, 
and could only communicate with them by the rather precarious 
method of balloons carrying messengers, or the still more 
risky enterprises of disguised individuals, who crept through 
the hostile lines of circumvallation, and were lucky enough 
not to be caught on the way. How many heroic feats, like 
Kavanagh's carrying of the message from Lucknow to Have- 
lock's camp, through a thousand dangers, have been rendered 
unnecessary in our own day by the invention of wireless 
telegraphy ! That once astounding but now familiar device 
enables a besieged garrison to keep up permanent and regular 
communication with a relieving force, even though a hostile 
army and a hundred miles lie between them. This was seen 
in the Great War both at Przemysl and at General Townshend's 
defence of Kut, where the fortress was able to give the army 
outside whatever information it wished — in both cases "to 
no successful effect. 

But in 1870-1 Paris was absolutely cut off from the French 
relieving army, though it was no farther off than Orleans. 
Hence came the numberless rumours, that used from time 



56 RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 

to time to gladden the heart of provincial France, about 
successful sorties and breaches in the German line. They 
could not be contradicted till the next balloon got over the lines 
of contravallation, and had a currency of many days. Paris, 
on the other hand, was still more badly placed for receiving 
news of what was going on outside, and was even more the 
prey of false tales which there was no means of testing. For 
to get news into the city was far more difficult than to get them 
out. As Parisian siege-diaries show, this was the classical 
epoch of lying rumours in modern times. 

The last crop of deceptions of this kind, depending on the 
absolute inaccessibility of a besieged garrison, which I can 
remember, were those relating to the alleged storming of the 
Pekin Legations, and the massacre of all their inmates, 
during the Chinese Boxer rebellion of 1901. Twice circum- 
stantial tales of a disaster got about, and once they were so 
detailed, and were uncontradicted for so long, that arrange- 
ments (as is still remembered) were made for a memorial 
service at St. Paul's for the alleged victims. The truth only 
got known just in time to prevent this celebration from taking 
place. 

Now that " wireless " enables a besieged garrison to give 
news of itself down to the last possible moment, such an incident 
would of course be impossible. The only chance of its repeti- 
tion would be in small and remote places, unfurnished with 
the modern appliances, and besieged either by savages, or by 
an enemy who for his own reasons wished to conceal the news 
of his success for as long as possible, so as to delude relieving 
forces. 

Since the Electric Telegraph has spanned the world, the 
rumour in times of peace can never flourish with regard to 
obvious public events — in a very short time it is discovered 
whether they have or have not happened. But &HMH 
had still one sphere open — a small and undignified one — 
she can be busy with personal rumours about individuals 
more or less prominent. She has taken the shape of mere 
scandal or slander, where she has as her scope no more than 
tales about the approaching bankruptcy or moral downfall 
of Lord A. or Mrs. B. Every one has heard false tales in 



RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 57 

his day concerning the domestic or financial infelicities of 
some notable member of society. But this is not the kind 
of " Rumour " with which I am dealing to-day. 

Occasionally stories of a circumstantial kind, which happen 
to be entirely false, get an unfair start, through becoming 
embodied in an official document which has achieved great 
publicity, and has circulated freely through a whole country. 
Examples ancient and modern are numerous. A very well- 
known specimen is the French naval legend of the Vengeur, 
which tells how on the " Glorious First of June " that line- 
of-battle ship, encompassed by many British vessels, refused 
to surrender, and went down with her tricolour flying and 
her crew singing the Marseillaise. Barrere invented the tale 
with all its details, and rehearsed it in the Convention, as a 
purple patch of consolation to set at the end of a notorious 
defeat. As a matter of fact there is ample British official 
documentary evidence to show that the Vengeur surrendered, 
and that her unwounded officers and crew, and some of the 
wounded also, were taken off her by British boats before 
she went down. But, as Barrere knew when he framed his lie, 
British documentary evidence would not be available to the 
French people, and his story was certain to get a start of 
months, and even years, before any contradiction would be 
forthcoming. So well had he calculated, that the Vengeur 
has not only got into all the popular French histories, 
but may still be seen represented in patriotic prints and 
pictures adorning the walls of provincial cafes and hotels, 
a century and a quarter after the supposed martyrdom of 
the ship. Indeed, it is only in the most specialized and well- 
documented modern French naval histories that the lie is aban- 
doned. It may still be found in full in the respectable Duruy's 
two-volume history of France, which was to the last genera- 
tion of French schoolboys what Green's History of the English 
People was to their English contemporaries. 

There was a similar legend afloat in Germany in 1914—16, 
which had for two years as great a success as Barrere's Vengeur 
story. It was the tale that, two days before the outbreak 
of the Great War, on August 1, 1914, French aviators dropped 
bombs far inside the German frontier in violation of all rules 



58 RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 

of international law, with the object of destroying railways. 
This was a mere newspaper invention, circulated by Wolff's 
Bureau through the length and breadth of Germany ; but 
it was taken up as a useful weapon by the Berlin authorities. 
And the story that bombs were dropped near Wesel in the 
Rhineland, and also at or near Nuremberg, figured both 
in the Declaration of War served on the French Govern- 
ment, in Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg's speech to the Reich- 
stag on August 4 justifying German policy, and in the official 
communiques circulated by the press. With this backing it 
became firmly established not only in popular legend, but in 
the dozens of " General Histories of the Great War of 1914," 
some of them very sumptuous and illustrated, which began 
to be published beyond the Rhine. Nevertheless, there was 
no truth in the story whatever : the Nuremberg incident 
was formally and officially contradicted by the Bavarian 
general commanding the military district in which that 
city lies. But as it was only contradicted in 1916, when 
the stoiy had got well abroad, and only in one or two local 
newspapers, the lie had had such a start that it became accepted 
history. As to the Wesel flier, who according to the official 
communique was actually shot down, and therefore must 
have been either killed or captured, nobody has ever heard 
of him again since August 4, 1914, though his name, the 
character of his machine, and the place of his burial or intern- 
ment would obviously have been forthcoming at once, if he 
had ever existed,— since his crime would have been a precious 
asset in the setting forth of the German justification for war. 
The French Government issued a formal denial that any 
French aviator crossed the frontier on that day, and an equally 
formal declaration that the first casualty in the French flying 
corps did not occur till more than two days after, long subse- 
quent to the formal opening of hostilities. The German 
public did not see French official documents ; and in any 
summaries of the events just before the outbreak of war which 
you may find printed in enemy lands during the years 1914—16, 
the Wesel and Nuremberg incidents continue regularly to 
crop up. So efficacious is a good start for an official lie, that 
it may long circulate in full vigour. Scores of years after its 



RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 59 

issue, only a small number of professional historians in the 
country concerned with its framing will know its real character, 
and many of them will not go out of their way to stigmatize 
it for what it was. 

These were " tendencious " falsehoods, made or used by 
responsible official persons for a definite political end. But there 
are many more instances where a perfectly truthless rumour 
has been spread abroad by unauthorized and irresponsible 
persons, till it has achieved a widespread circulation, and 
has in some cases had considerable results on the envisage- 
ment of the situation of the moment by a whole people. Gener- 
ally such stories are believed because they are convenient 
to those who wish to credit them, as throwing moral blame 
on enemies, or ministering encouragement to those who feel 
their need of it, or giving a plausible explanation of a puzzling 
political problem. 

To this class of popular legends belong such tales — to 
take an old instance — as that of the Warming-Pan imposture 
at the birth of the Old Pretender. We cannot trace it to any 
definite Whig inventor, but it was a useful lie for the party, 
and was believed because it was convenient. It penetrated 
at once not only into mouth-to-mouth circulation, but into 
pamphlets, popular songs, and even political medals. Many 
years elapsed before it died out as a useful taunt to administer 
to Jacobites. It was, we may incidentally remark, the last 
example in English history of an old type of anti-dynastic 
rumour, which was intended to throw doubt on the legitimacy 
of a king or an heir to the throne — earlier and exactly parallel 
cases had been the Yorkist accusation that Edward Prince of 
Wales (the boy who fell at Tewkesbury) was not the true son 
of Henry VI, the much more far-fetched Lancastrian counter- 
cry that Edward IV was not the child of Richard Duke of 
York, and the better-known story put about by Richard III 
officially, that his nephews were illegitimate, because their 
father had been secretly betrothed or even married to another 
lady before he ever saw Elizabeth Woodville, so that his 
union with her was bigamous. 

A later example of a groundless lie, which ran far afield 
and had considerable political results, was the panic during 



60 RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 

the French Revolution called " La Grande Peur," a wild story 
of a hypothetical reactionary plot for a general massacre of 
patriots, which led to the general embodiment of the National 
Guard and many isolated outrages against royalists, though 
it had no foundation whatever. Attempts have been made 
to trace the origin and deliberate spreading abroad of the 
rumour to the entourage of Philippe Egalite, Duke of Orleans, 
but with little success. The rumour seems to have had no 
traceable parentage, but it undoubtedly served the pur- 
poses of the revolutionary party. In this case we may say 
that a phase of national psychology was the real explaining 
cause — the attitude of fear, anger, and suspicion was the 
parent of the necessary legend to justify its existence. 

That such rumours are not impossible in our own day, 
when it might have been thought that the facility of internal 
methods of communication would have rendered them impos- 
sible, was sufficiently shown by the story of the " hundred 
thousand Russian troops from Archangel" which was so 
universally current for four or five days in the whole of England 
during the later part of the month of August in 1914. Probably 
every reader of these pages was more or less the victim of 
this rumour. I had attached little credit to it till, on the 
third day of its circulation, I got by one post three letters, 
one from a friend in South Gloucestershire saying that there 
were Russians at Avonmouth, only a few miles from him, 
a second from another friend in the Isle of Wight, saying 
that he had been watching steamers with Russians on board 
emerging from Southampton Water, and the third from 
Oxford, to the effect that numerous troop-trains, laden (as 
my informant was assured) with Russians, had been passing 
through Oxford station on the way to Southampton all the 
previous night. Then, I must confess, my doubts wavered, 
for all my three correspondents were writing from a very 
short distance from the places where the Russians were supposed 
to have been. It was only when days passed, and no credible 
person would vouch to having had an actual view of our 
imaginary allies, that one gradually realized that the true 
parent of the story was the general appreciation in England 
that reinforcements were badly heeded at the front, and a wish 



RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 61 

that they should appear from somewhere, with a consequent 
legend that they had actually arrived. In fairness to the 
public it must be remembered that every one could see good 
reasons for reinforcing the Western front at that moment, when 
we were so hard pressed at the end of the Mons retreat. More- 
over, there was no actual physical impossibility in transporting 
considerable bodies of men from Archangel to the Northern 
parts of Great Britain. The public could not know then, as 
we all know now, that Russia had no large surplus of trained 
battalions to spare at the moment ; her resources were believed 
to be unlimited, and available. Moreover, there was just 
the slightest base of fact for the rumour, as there chanced to 
be at the moment a considerable body of Russian military 
and naval staff officers collected at Edinburgh, who were 
making arrangements for the development of the traffic to and 
from Archangel with the British staff in Scotland. And also 
at the same time appreciable numbers of Russian reservists 
were passing into Liverpool from Canada and the United States, 
having been summoned to join their colours in Europe. I 
believe that at the most there were 5,000 or 7,000 of them, and 
they were, of course, all without uniforms and not moving in 
military units. How far this slender base of fact was respon- 
sible for the spread of the rumour I do not pretend to say ; but 
in the form which the rumour took, there was little relation 
between the foundation and the superstructure. 

Yet we should remember that there was nothing absolutely 
impossible in the story, except the numbers of the arriving 
allies : for similar movements were in reality carried out in 
the course of the two following years. On one occasion 
Oxford station was really full of foreign friends — three train- 
loads of Italians, Austrian subjects who had been conscripts, 
had been captured by the Russians, and had volunteered 
from the Russian prison-camps for service in the Italian 
Army. They did perform, the extraordinary circuit from 
Galicia, where they had been taken prisoners, through Russia 
to Archangel, from thence by the Arctic Ocean and the North 
Sea to Britain, and so by Southampton to France and the 
Mont Cenis tunnel. And a similar circuitous voyage was 
performed later, by a body of Austro-Slav enthusiasts, who 



62 RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 

volunteered from the Russian prison-camps to join the Serbian 
Army, and came round from Archangel just as did the Italians. 
The rumour of 1914 was therefore not quite so absurd as some 
people have styled it. At the same time, I believe that its 
origin must be sought rather in the psychological needs of 
Great Britain at the moment than in the small foundations 
of fact that I have mentioned above. The majority of the 
people who spread the rumour would have been quite unable 
to give reasonable grounds for demonstrating that the tale 
which they were disseminating was physically possible, so 
far as transport and movement of troops went. 

The memory of the imaginary Russians in the autumn 
of 1914 suggests another curious psychological phenomenon 
of that time, or rather of some few months later — for it was 
most diffused in the spring of 1915, — the wild tale of the " Mons 
Angels." This had a vast popularity in April and May : 
in the form which it took in most cases it has been traced 
back to a letter in a local magazine from Clifton. The version 
there given was that on an unspecified day during the Mons 
retreat German cavalry had got round the left wing of the 
retiring British Army, and bid fair to take it in flank and 
roll it up with disastrous consequences, when a whole troop 
of shining figures was seen interposed between this advanced 
cavalry and the British flank. " The Germans to our amaze- 
ment stood like dazed men, did not bring up their guns, nor 
stirred till we had turned off and escaped by some side-roads." 
One of the supposed narrators in this magazine added his 
personal experience — his company was retreating to a posi- 
tion where it seemed possible that a stand could be made, 
but before they could reach it the German cavalry were 
upon them. They turned therefore and formed up, expecting 
nothing but instant death, when to their wonder they saw 
between them and the enemy " a whole troop of angels. 
The German horses swerved round and regularly stampeded. 
The men were tugging at their bridles, but the poor beasts 
tore away in every direction from us." 

The writer of the article in the magazine was traced, and 
confessed that the story had not come directly from the 
supposed narrators, with whom she had no personal acquain 



RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 63 

tance, not even being certain of their names. It was no more 
than hearsay. No indication of this had been given in the 
magazine, where parts of the narrative were couched in the 
first person, as if taken down from the mouth of an actual 
witness. There seemed some reason to believe that the whole 
story had its ultimate source in a work of fiction, a tale called 
The Archers, published in September, 1914, by Mr. Bernard 
Machen, in which St. George and a company of supernatural 
archers were represented as standing between the retiring 
British and the advancing Germans who were outflanking 
them. A correspondence concerning this supposed fictional 
source continued between Mr. Machen and Mr. Harold Begbie in 
the Evening News of August and September, 1915, and resulted 
in producing the impression that while Mr. Machen's novel 
was largely responsible for some of the details of the angel- 
story, there was a substratum of other origin. That is, there 
were certain British officers who thought that there was 
something odd and inexplicable in the way in which the enemy 
refrained from pressing the flank of the Second Army Corps 
on the morning after the battle of La Cateau. It is now 
known that the Germans were dead beat, and had suffered 
so severely in the battle that they had no power to press 
hard upon the retreating force, which appreciated the danger 
of its own position in the acutest way. The troops were tired 
out, and conscious that they were in no condition to fight 
another action. Among the numerous letters which cropped 
up during the controversy in the Evening News, there were 
two or three which are worth noting. The authors gave their 
names, and were undoubtedly present on the spot on that 
day. But their evidence is not about " Angels," but about 
hallucinatory French cavalry, covering the flank of the 
retiring corps, which vanished in an inexplicable fashion 
when the crisis was over. One witness, a colonel, writes 
[September 14] : — 

" The brigade to which I belonged was rear- guard to the division, 
and during the 27th we took up a great many successive positions to 
cover the retirement of the rest of the division ; by the night we were 
all absolutely worn out with fatigue, both bodily and mental. No 
doubt we suffered also to a certain extent from shock, but the retire- 



64 RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 

ment was continued in excellent order, and I feel sure that our mental 
faculties were still in good working condition. On the night of the 
27th I was riding along in the column with two other officers ; we were 
talking and doing our best to keep from falling asleep on our horses." 

The narrator then says that he suddenly became aware of 
a very large body of horsemen in the fields on the flank, 
moving parallel with the British troops, and covering them. 
He watched these squadrons for some twenty minutes, and 
spoke about them to the two officers who were in his company. 

" So convinced were we that they were real cavalry, that at the 
next halt one of the officers took out a party to reconnoitre, but could 
find no one there. The night then grew darker and we saw no 
more. The same phenomenon was seen by many men in the column 
— of course we were all dog-tired and overtaxed, but it is extraordinary 
that the same phenomenon should be witnessed by many different 
people. I am absolutely convinced that I saw these horsemen, and 
that they did not exist only in my imagination." 

The other narrator says : — 

" We had almost reached the end of the retreat, and after marching 
a whole day and night, with but one half -hour's rest, we found ourselves 
on the outskirts of Lagny, just at dawn. As the day broke we could 
see in front of us large bodies of cavalry, all formed up in squadrons — 
fine big men on massive chargers. I remember tinning to my chums 
and saying, ' Thank God ! We are not far off Paris now. Look at 
the French cavalry.' They too saw them quite plainly, but to our 
surprise on getting closer the horsemen vanished, and gave place to 
banks of white mist, with clumps of trees and bushes showing dimly 
through them. When I tell you that hardened old soldiers were march- 
ing quite mechanically along the road, babbling all sorts of nonsense in 
sheer delirium, you may well believe that we were in a fit state to take 
a row of beanstalks for all the saints in the calendar." 

It will be noted that both witnesses speak of the utter fatigue 
of the marching column : but the one thinks the hallucinatory 
cavalry was a misrepresentation of shadows of the night and 
mist by tired eyes and brains, while the other thinks that 
there was more than imagination at work, only he will not 
vouch for what it was. 

Whatever the right interpretation, there can be no doubt 
that many men on the exposed British flank, acutely conscious 



RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 65 

of the danger of an outflanking pursuit, thought that 
they saw large masses of cavalry covering them, just where 
they were wanted, for a considerable space of time, and then 
found that the supposed cavalry had melted away into nothing. 
Was it a case of the need producing the supposed remedy ? 
Or may we conjecture that for some time there were real 
French cavalry on the flank, which withdrew by some cross- 
road without being noticed at the moment of their departure ? 
At any rate, there is scant foundation for a legend of angels, 
though some definite evidence for what the beholders regarded 
as a welcome appearance of a non-existent force. 

The story of the Mons Retreat Angels has undoubted rela- 
tions in its extreme and fully developed form, after it had 
been improved by passing through many magazines and news- 
papers, with an ancient form of legend, — that of the visible 
supernatural champion who comes to help the army of his 
race or of his faith in a moment of supreme need. We can 
trace this back to Herodotus and the ghostly heroes who 
were seen fighting in the Greek ranks against the Persians. 
There is a fine example of it in early Roman history, in the 
story of Castor and Pollux at the battle of Lake Regillus, 
familiar to every schoolboy from Macaulay's Lays of Ancient 
Rome. But it is by no means confined to classical days — 
some of the more respectable chroniclers of the Crusades 
have a circumstantial account of the apparition of St. George, 
in shining armour and on a white horse, to lead the exhausted 
squadron of the Crusaders at the great battle of Antioch in 
1098. It is more surprising to find that Santiago, who from a 
pilgrim-apostle had developed into the military saint of Spanish 
chivalry, not only manifested himself in several battles with the 
Moors in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but was seen as late 
as 1519 rallying the conquistador 'es of Cortez, when they were 
in danger of being overwhelmed by the masses of the infuriated 
Mexicans. But there is a more extraordinary story than 
this to finish up the tale of supernatural warrior-leaders. 
My Serbian friends assure me that there is no doubt whatever 
that in the Balkan War of 1912 many of the Serbian rank and 
file thought that they saw Marco Kralievitch, the hero of 
mediseval Serbia, riding on his white horse in front of the 

u.c.d. F 



66 RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 

battalions that stormed the almost impregnable Turkish 
positions in the fighting that followed the battle of Kumanovo. 
And it was not mere isolated visionaries who declared that 
they had followed him, but whole companies and brigades. 
They saw the white horse ride up impossible slopes, and 
clambering after him burst through line after line of Turkish 
trenches. After this, who will think the assertions of the 
companions of Cortez very remarkable ? 

A much more commonplace and comprehensible rumour 
of the recent war is one that was current almost everywhere 
about the middle of August, 1914, when the news ran that 
the German High Seas Fleet had come out, and had fought 
a general action with our own, somewhere in the North Sea. 
The versions only differed as to the relative losses, our own 
were always stated to be heavy — the German even heavier. 
There was no truth whatever in the rumour, which reached as 
far as Iceland : a friend told me that he had it in full detail at 
Reikiavik about August 12 — the same day that I was told it 
myself at Pitlochry. This was, I think, simply the result of a 
universally current idea that the German Fleet would come out, 
for the strategical purpose of threatening the British coast, 
in order to prevent our army from being sent overseas to 
Belgium. Public opinion was wrong, and misjudged the 
psychology of the German Admiralty, which was not at that 
time prepared to stake its fleet-in-being on a very doubtful 
hazard, to secure an insufficient end. For undoubtedly 
at that time the all-highest command on the other side of the 
North Sea thought that our " contemptible little army " 
would make no difference one way or the other, whether it 
crossed or did not cross to the continental seat of war. 

It will be noted that most of these rumours had their chance 
of life granted to them owing to that artificial hindrance to 
the free diffusion of information, which does not exist in normal 
times of peace — the existence of the Censorship. I set aside the 
Mons Angels and Marco Kralievitch as belonging to the frankly 
supernatural ; but the stories of Russian troops in Britain, 
or of " scraps " on a large scale in the North Sea, could only 
be circulated for more than a few hours on the hypothesis 
that there were political or strategic reasons for the Censor's 



RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 67 

keeping back the information. The reason would be obvious 
enough in the case of the Russian reinforcements, less easy 
to discern in that of the alleged naval battle. But the public 
always credited the Censorship with gratuitous stupidity, and 
reticence of the most senseless kind, so that it was not impos- 
sible for the circulator of rumours to gain acceptance for his 
tale for at least a day or two. He could point out cases, 
indeed, where reticence had in real truth been protracted 
for an unconscionable time, as for example the late acknow- 
ledgment of the loss of a certain well-known battleship early 
in the war. Every one could guess at plausible reasons for 
its being held back for a certain time, but it was the prolonga- 
tion of the time which gave rise to comment. In this case 
Rumour was (by way of exception) founded on fact : it is 
one of the few prominent instances of the kind, however, 
that I can recall. As a rule, the tales, whether optimistic or 
pessimistic in tone, rested on no solid foundation, and were 
simply the expression of expectations, well founded or ill 
founded according to the amount of data at the disposal 
of the imaginative original starter of the legend. There 
was a curious example of the kind afoot early in the year 
1918, to explain a phenomenon obvious to every one yet 
inexplicable to the majority. 

As every one knows there were no air-raids on London 
between December 16, 1917, and January 28, 1918. By the 
time that the January full moon had been reached, all sorts 
of absurd rumours were current as to some new scientific 
invention having been discovered (I will not give the elaborate 
descriptions of it which were detailed to me) which would 
make all further raids impossible. On the 28th came another 
aerial visitation in the usual style, and the story of the wonder- 
ful invention fell flat. It was simply an attempt to explain 
an observed fact, made by imaginative people with no scientific 
knowledge whatever ; for the^ details given were impossible, 
as experts explained to me. This was an absurd optimistic 
rumour : there have been plenty of mistakes of the opposite 
kind, rumours of an equally irrational pessimistic cast, which 
anyone can recall for himself. They were for the most part 
attempts to account for facts that were worrying persons of 



68 RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 

a downcast frame of mind, by the invention of the most 
unpleasant possible explanation that could be devised. 

In these pages I have been dealing only with Rumour in 
the strictest sense of the word. There is a whole section 
of psychological phenomena of an allied sort which I have 
left untouched of set purpose. This is the section that I may 
label with the heading of Prophecies. It may not be generally 
known that there is a small occultist literature in existence with 
regard to the war of 1914-18 ; in the National War Museum 
there lie some dozen books printed in all parts of the world — 
England, France, America, Germany — which recall the predic- 
tions of Nostradamus, Trithemius, Mother Shipton, or (in a 
slightly varied form) of the late Dr. Cumming and Madame 
de Thebes. The latter, I believe, died while the war was 
actually in progress, not without having uttered some of her 
usual type of vaticinations. 

This kind of literature can hardly be called " Rumour," 
since it is generally printed, and not passed from mouth to 
mouth, and since it does not pretend to deal with the present 
but rather with the near future. The few books or leaflets 
that circulate to-day are the last survivors of a very ancient 
and prolific race. Prophets who see visions and write them 
down for the purpose of influencing wars, politics, or it may 
be morals, have always existed. They run into the lines of 
the ancient oracles and apocalypses at the one end, and into 
those of the modern tendencious pamphlet at the other. But 
I cannot call them Rumours, though they sometimes reflect the 
current and popular expectations of the multitude. Of course, 
the file of prophecies would not be complete without one or two 
pretending to be exhumed from forgotten mediaeval volumes, 
and others identifying the German Emperor (like so many 
other hated characters of the past from Nero to Napoleon) 
with the Beast's little horn in Daniel, and No. 666 in the Book 
of Revelations. The professional prophets were on the whole 
very unfortunate in their prognostications concerning the 
details of the late war. Nor can we wonder at it ; the expecta- 
tions of much wiser men than the sort of people who compile 
such stuff were not fulfilled. Who, in England, France, 
Germany, Russia, or America, would have foreseen in 1914 



RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 69 

the exact sequence of military affairs down to the Armistice 
of November, 1918 ? The makers of forecasts with no pretence 
to supernatural knowledge were mostly by way of promising 
us an end of the struggle in three months, or a year, or two years. 
And the Germans were equally ill-served by their makers 
of military prognostications, as witness the six months' sub- 
marine work that was to bring the British Empire to ruin, 
according to the views of official and highly placed prophets. 

With prophecies we may exclude, from the list of things 
to be dealt with, dreams, portents, and visions, except when 
they have been much passed round by the public mouth or 
the printing press, like the Mons Angels, mentioned on an 
earlier page. Usually they were literary productions, not 
genuine examples of the credulity of the multitude ; and they 
had small success for that reason, because the vitality of a 
rumour depends on the condition that the recipients and 
circulators of it should believe that they are dealing with a 
something genuine, and not with a work of fiction. Perhaps 
one may add that dreamers of dreams and seers of visions 
share in the curse of Cassandra : they have not as a rule 
the art of making themselves credible — they are too often 
obviously set on forwarding some theory or crank of their 
own, which emerges too clearly, and enables the reader to see 
that he is in reality confronted with nothing more than a 
tendencious pamphlet in verse or prose. 

My subject is one of a rather incoherent character — it is 
rather like Virgil's Cyclops, a veritable monstrum informe ingens. 
The strict logical arrangement rightly loved by the historical 
mind is hard to secure, when we deal with such an elusive 
topic. All that is possible is to collect suggestive deductions 
from many and various examples of rumour. And if I am 
asked, in the good mediaeval style, to put a moral at the end 
of my discourse, in the manner of the delightful authors of 
the Gesta Romanorum, I am afraid that my moral must be 
a very old-fashioned one, to wit, that we are the children of 
our fathers, that we should not jest too much at " mediaeval 
credulity," and that we should recognize in the rumour- 
phenomena of our own day the legitimate descendants of 
those which used to puzzle and amaze our ancestors, whom 



70 RUMOUR IN TIME OF WAR 

we were too often prone to regard with the complacent superi- 
ority of the omniscient nineteenth century. The Great War 
has taught us — among other things — a little psychology and 
a good deal of humility. 



IV 



SOME MEDIEVAL CONCEPTIONS OF ANCIENT 

HISTORY 1 

To attempt to deal in twenty pages with the historical 
perspective of a thousand years would be an over-ambitious 
task, if one endeavoured to complete it in too minute and 
conscientious a fashion. But the views of our spiritual fore- 
fathers the Chroniclers of the Middle Ages upon the annals 
of Ancient Greece and Rome were so peculiar, not to say 
so preposterous, that they are worth collecting. For in 
order to understand the spirit of an age, one should have 
some conception of its outlook on the past. There were 
political philosophers even in mediaeval days, and the theories 
of the political philosopher are based on his conceptions of 
the history of the elder world, and on the deductions which 
he draws from it. Most chroniclers, it is true, were not so 
much political philosophers as anecdotal annalists : but 
many of them were possessed with the same wild ambition 
for writing Universal Histories that inspired Walter Raleigh 
in his prison in the Tower of London. And some carried, 
out this ambition, and piled volume on volume with small 
mercy for their readers. It is worth while to get some general 
view as to what the elect historical minds of the thirteenth 
or the fourteenth or the fifteenth centuries thought about 
the long series of years which counted backward from the 
birth of Our Lord to the creation of Adam, so conveniently 
and accurately fixed for 4275 B.C. 

Professional historians were not over common in the Middle 
Ages, but it is to their views that we shall confine our atten- 
tion. As to the conceptions of the unlearned we need not 

1 Delivered in its original form as a lecture to the Royal Historical 
Society on February 10, 1921. 

71 



72 MEDIEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 

trouble ourselves about them — though they have their psycho- 
logical interest. To the large majority of men the name 
of Greece suggested very little — not more than that of Egypt 
or Persia, — and that of Rome not very much. We find it 
hard to conceive what sort of a person is meant by a " King 
of Grsecia " when he turns up in some Romance in company 
with a king of Media or a Soldan of Babylon. As to the name 
of Rome, it certainly brought up to the man in the street three 
ideas — firstly, that our father the Pope lived there, in due 
succession to St. Peter. Secondly, that once upon a time 
there had been a long series of Roman Emperors, much given 
to putting the Saints to death in more or less barbarous ways. 
Thirdly, that the pre-eminence of those ancient heathen rulers 
of the world had descended to the continental prince now 
bearing the title of Roman Emperor, in some fashion or other 
on which the learned alone were entitled to have views. But 
certainly good Englishmen must deprecate the possible claims 
of that continental prince to be recognized as suzerain in 
England, as Duke Humphrey of Gloucester did with such 
firmness at the landing of the Emperor Sigismund in the 
year 1416. 

There was a vague memory in most parts of Christendom 
that the Romans had once been spread over all the Western 
world, and had reared those great buildings, monuments, 
and public works of which traces were scattered everywhere. 
In many cases the magnitude of them seems to have so much 
impressed the simple mediaeval mind, that they were believed 
to have been executed by no mortal hand, but by magic or 
the powers of evil. Examples of this are the Roman road 
in Northumberland which came to be called the " Devil's 
Causeway," and the long rampart which shut off Rhaetia 
and the Agri Decumates from inner Germany, which Suabians 
and Bavarians called the " Teufelsmauer." But often the 
tradition of Roman origin had grown so loose that the great 
works of the Flavians or the Antonines became ascribed to 
some native hero, or heroine, or semi-divine character, of 
the conquering races that followed the old civilization, like 
the Chaussee de Brunehaute in Belgium, or the Watling Street 
and Ermyn Street of England. 



MEDLEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 73 

But we are dealing not so much with Roman memories 
enshrined in folk-lore and popular tradition, as with those 
to be found in books — giving the impression which ancient 
history left upon the educated and literary classes of the thir- 
teenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 

The first characteristic which strikes us in the mediaeval 
author's knowledge of ancient history, is that it was nearly 
all composed of second-hand information. Of course the 
original sources for Greek history were practically closed, 
by the fact that the Western world was almost entirely ignorant 
of the Greek language down to the fifteenth century. Men 
like John of Salisbury and Bishop Grossetete may have had 
a smattering of it. But, as it chanced, the historians seem 
to have been one and all destitute of the linguistic know- 
ledge which would have enabled them to go to Herodotus, 
Thucydides, or Xenophon, if manuscripts of those authors 
had been forthcoming. All information about classical 
Greece comes through Roman epitomes of second-rate value. 
And with regard to Roman history, where language was 
no bar, it is not too much to say that the Middle Ages had 
no criterion of the relative importance of sources. Though 
they might possess Livy and Csesar — Tacitus was little known 
— they relied far more on compilations and epitomes, such as 
Orosius (first and foremost), Justin's abbreviation of Trogus 
Pompeius, or the lives in Cornelius Nepos. These were 
the staple foundation of those who wrote on ancient history, 
but they were supplemented by a profusion of anecdotes 
picked from the most various sources, from the legends of 
the Saints, Josephus, Aulus Gellius, Valerius Maximus, Augus- 
tine's De Civitate Dei (which supplied many a story), and 
in England at least (though not abroad) from Geoffrey of 
Monmouth's astounding inventions, which by the aid of 
ill-digested Welsh folk-lore falsified three centuries of real 
Roman history. 

Now even from such authorities a historian with a good 
critical instinct could have written a more or less correct 
outline of ancient history, more especially of that of Rome, 
though so many primary sources now available to us were 
not in his power to discover, and although he had much worth- 



74 MEDLEVAL VIEWS ON HISTOKY 

less material at hand which we have learned to reject. But 
unfortunately good critical power was just what the average 
mediaeval historian lacked. It seems that all written books 
had equal authority for him, and that he had not the flair 
to differentiate the good from the had, — secondary from 
primary information. Indeed right down into Renaissance 
times this was one of the weak points of the scholar — as is 
well realized by all who remember how many of the early 
printed books are editions of authors whom we now regard 
as of very third-rate importance. Occasionally I have found 
even obvious works of ancient fiction quoted by a mediaeval 
writer, as if they were historical evidence — in the Polychronicon 
Apuleius' story of the Golden Ass is seriously cited as evidence 
for the perfection to which in ancient days the art of witch- 
craft had been carried ! The consequence of this want of 
discrimination and historical perspective was that tales out 
of the iEneid were treated as being no less grave history 
than tales out of Josephus, and that the pseudo-Callisthenes 
received as much respect as a source for the history of Alexander 
the Great as did Justin or Orosius. Plutarch and Arrian, 
not being in Latin but in Greek, were of course not available 
for the history of the Macedonian conqueror. 

Any one who looks through a mediaeval history of the world 
will be struck, first and foremost, by the fact that the his- 
torians of those days had no dividing line between legend 
and authentic history. Cadmus was just as real to them 
as Philip of Macedon ; Romulus as the Emperor Vespasian. 
The tales of the early gods and heroes did not immediately 
betray their mythical character to the mediaeval chronicler, 
as they do to us, by abounding in marvellous tales, in hydras 
and dragons, Cyclopes and Centaurs and Satyrs, and wolf 
foster-mothers. Such marvels the man of the fourteenth 
century was quite ready to digest and reproduce, and put 
in their due place in classic annals. The reason was that 
he could produce tales exactly parallel to them from his 
own legendary period, the Age of the Saints, the first four 
centuries after Christ. If St. George had slain a dragon, 
why should not Cadmus have done the same? If Hercules 
was said to have fallen in with the Satyrs, had not St. Anthony 



MEDIEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 75 

met and conversed with one in the Theban Desert ? If St. 
Patrick and St. Hilda had turned noxious reptiles into stone, 
might not Perseus have done the same to the sea monster 
when he rescued Andromeda ? Simon Magus had flown 
through the air by his spells — as we see him pictured in many 
a predella — till dashed down by the exorcisms of St. Peter. 
Was it then impossible that Medea, by equally wicked arts, 
had performed the same feat ? Why should any one dis- 
believe in harpies and syrens, chimseras and minotaurs, 
when (as every one knew) there were one-eyed men in Africa, 
and gryphons in India, and all kinds of monstrous blends 
of man and bird and beast in the extreme East of Asia, such 
as the lively imaginations of the compiler of the Hereford 
Mappa Mundi and the illustrator of the pseudo-Mandeville 
have left portrayed for us. The merely marvellous and mon- 
strous in those days aroused no suspicion in the historian's 
mind, and was accepted without criticism. 

There was, however, one side of all the old classical 
legendary tales which compelled the mediaeval chronicler 
to exercise in a more or less acute fashion his critical faculty. 
This was the habitual appearance in ancient tales of the 
heathen gods and goddesses as distinct and divine person- 
alities. Of course Christian faith distinctly precluded the 
acceptance of these divinities as gods — the ten command- 
ments rule them out. What then was to be done ? The 
story of Hercules or of Romulus appeared to rest upon just 
the same authority as that of Alexander the Great or Julius 
Caesar. Probably then there was some foundation for it, 
though it had got down to posterity in the wrong shape. 

Now there were two ways in which the chronicler might 
discover an explanation that sufficed him as to the real origin 
of such matters. Firstly it was quite possible that the incidents 
occurred much as they had been related, but that the super- 
natural element in them had been attributed to a wrong cause. 
For though it was not permitted by the Christian faith to 
think of Jupiter or Apollo or Venus as gods, there was no 
objection to regarding them as devils. This view is often 
to be found in lives of the early saints, where we find stories 
of temples or statues shattered by a dragon or demon flying 



76 MEDLEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 

out of them in rage and despair, when conjured by the apostle 
or martyr who has been challenged by kings or priests to 
oppose the power of the Christian's God to that of their own 
local divinity. Many travellers will remember early Italian 
pictures in which St. Philip is deconsecrating the temple 
of Mars in this fashion, with a monstrous snake-like devil 
taking his unwilling departure. But the best story that I 
know of the kind comes from the life of Gregory Nazianzen. 
The saint, belated in travelling, took refuge in a dark 
portico, which at morning light proved to be that of an oracular 
temple of Apollo. The oracle that day refused to perform 
at all — the priests discovered that a Christian priest had 
slept in the shrine, and sent for the saint, to bid him take 
off the ban which he had unwittingly placed upon the utter- 
ances of their god. Gregory did not — as we might perhaps 
have expected — refuse the request, but, after warning them 
of the wickedness of their practices, wrote a short epistle, 
and bade them lay it on the tripod. The epistle ran, " Gregory 
to Satan : you may re-enter." When it was placed on the 
tripod, the inspiration returned at once to the priests, and 
the machinery worked as usual. From which we can only 
conclude that Apollo was Satan, as it would seem : or at 
any rate that Satan had control of Apollo, as a minor demon. 
The legend of the " Ring given to Venus " distinctly makes 
Venus a satellite of the principle of evil, who is seen walking 
behind the car of the great master of all bad spirits. But 
I take it that the Venus of the Tannhauser legend is rather 
an old surviving nature-power of lust and luxury, than a 
mere instrument of the Christian Satan. 

An odd variant in the treatment of the classical super- 
natural by the mediaeval mind is a theory that magicians 
sometimes personated the heathen gods for their private 
ends. The most typical instance of such a case is that of 
Nectanebus, King of Egypt, as he appears not only in the 
Romance of Alisannder, but in the sober pages of the 
chronicler Higden. This monarch was truly learned in all 
the wisdom of the Egyptians ! And before he took to 
imitating the gods he had performed some extensive magical 
operations to the detriment of the navy of Artaxerxes Ochus, 



MEDLEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 77 

King of Persia. Per carmina magica, we are told, et per fig- 
menta fantastica, he composed waxen images of the whole 
Persian fleet, which he set afloat in a bowl, and then sank 
by blowing into the water with a magic pipe of ebony. This 
proceeding had the effect of raising a storm in the Levant, 
by which the whole of the Great King's ships were wrecked. 
What would not modern admiralties give for the secret of 
this device ! But being finally driven out of Egypt, he unex- 
pectedly manifested himself at the court of Philip of Macedon, 
when he suddenly appeared to Queen Olympias amid thunder 
and lightning, with ram's horns upon his head, assuming the 
character of Jupiter Ammon, because as an African he had 
a preference for an African god ! Hence came the universal 
belief that Ammon had been the parent of Alexander the 
Great. 

But there was another way of dealing with the classical 
divinities which was decidedly more popular. It was much 
more respectful to an ancient historian to believe that he 
had been misled by popular exaggeration and rumour, than 
that he had been deceived by devils or art-magic. This 
was the method quite familiar to the ancients themselves, 
and generally associated with the name of Euhemerus, the 
sceptic of the Cyrenaic school, who in his 'legd Avayqaqrq 
reduced all the gods into historical characters, whose doings 
had been distorted by tradition. I do not suppose that 
many mediseval chroniclers knew the name of Euhemerus 
— but his method was freely used. This produces some 
grotesque results : in a tabular chronological arrangement 
which synchronizes biblical and classical history, we find, 
in the same year as Abraham's descent into Egypt, the note 
" at this time there appeared near Lake Tritonis a virgin 
called Tritonis, who was also named Pallas from a giant whom 
she had slain — she invented the art of wool-weaving, and 
was therefore hailed as a goddess by the heathen." And 
so in the same way we find Liber qui el Bacchus flourishing 
in the time of Ehud, Mercury in that of Gideon, and the 
death of Hercules — by falling into the fire while in an epileptic 
fit— in that of Tola the son of Puah. Jupiter appears as 
a King of Crete, who drove out his father, King Saturnus. 



78 MEDIAEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 

He was a mighty conqueror at large, et quia bellicosissimus 
et sceleratissimus fuit, a Grcecis deus est vocatus. In the same 
way Pluto was a cruel and gloomy king of the Molossians, 
who used to imprison travellers in an underground dungeon ; 
and Apollo a celebrated physician and archer. To call a man 
a son of Jupiter, Mars, or Apollo, merely meant to express 
in hyperbolical terms the fact that he was a person of great 
powers, bodily or mental. And thus the whole of the ancient 
classical legends can be reduced to workaday history ! 

When, therefore, by a rough calculation of generations 
the old myths had been fitted into a chronological table, 
they could be written down as excellent history, parallel 
to the Old Testament story from Abraham to Eli. After 
this had been done, it became an easy matter to deduce that 
it was absurd to make one god pervade the whole period. 
" How," asks Higden, " can Epaphus have been the son 
of Jupiter and Io, when the latter was contemporary with 
Isaac, while Jupiter is primarily connected with Europa, 
who lived in the time of Joshua, several centuries later ? " 
Why the connexion of Jupiter with Europa should be more 
convincing than his connexion with Io, passes my wit to 
tell : but Higden knew. I may here remark that when 
dealing with the Trojan legends, Vergil is always followed 
— with occasional hints from Geoffrey of Monmouth — that 
great source of errors. The mediaeval version is therefore 
always grossly unfair to the Greeks — Homer and the great 
tragedians being of course utterly unknown. So we get 
a very Trojan version of the whole affair — generally ending 
with the migration of Brutus, that well-known kinsman 
of iEneas, to the Britain on which he bestowed his name. 

When we get out of the time of legends, Greek history 
becomes a scrappy collection of tales of great men, — the 
outline from Orosius, the details from third-hand anecdotic 
people like Cornelius Nepos. Of course Herodotus, Thucy- 
dides and Xenophon were all unknown as sources. The 
importance of the Persian wars is vaguely adumbrated, but 
the ground-knowledge of the period is so faulty that, for 
example, the author of the Eulogium Historiarum con- 
sistently calls Leonidas of Thermopylae the King of the 



MEDIEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 79 

Athenians ! There is a heterogeneous string of tales about 
tyrants and philosophers, notably Socrates, Diogenes the 
Cynic, Zaleucus, Plato, and Dionysius of Syracuse, drawn 
from Aulus Gellius, Valerius or Isidore. But most of these 
anecdotes do not partake of the marvellous or supernatural, 
and we think (wrongly !) that we are out of legendary times 
and touching firm ground of real history. 

This is a vain delusion : Alexander the Great is yet to 
come : and with him we are plunged once more into a period 
of wild tales, as astounding as those about the early gods 
and heroes. For the strange legends chaotically mixed up 
with the realities of his eventful life, one source appears to 
be mainly responsible — the book generally known as Pseudo- 
Callisthenes. There was, of course, a real Callisthenes [I 
do not mean an ingenious modern gentleman whose name 
is familiar to us all in connexion with Oxford Street], an 
unfortunate philosopher who came to a dreadful end for 
crossing Alexander when he was in one of his fits of oriental 
megalomania. But the astonishing work usually known by 
his name was a collection of folk-tales and anecdotic adven- 
tures, compiled apparently at the Byzantine Court, and 
permeated with Persian as well as with Greek influence, which 
was very popular in the West from the time of the Crusades 
onward. Most chroniclers borrowed from it freely as a histori- 
cal source — though in the shape of the Romance of Alisannder 
it was also current as more or less acknowledged fiction. 
The King's life is touched with Christian, as opposed to 
classical, allusions in some parts, e.g. when Alexander reached 
the Gates of Caucasus [not far from Baku] he found waiting 
outside them the ten lost tribes of Israel, who requested 
his permission to return to Palestine. But hearing from 
the high-priest Jaddua at Jerusalem of the wickedness and 
idolatry which had caused their exile, he refused them leave 
to pass, and bricked up the Caucasian Gates with a great 
wall. The moment he got east from Caucasus, he came into 
the land of marvels — he received a visit from Thalestris, 
the Queen of the Amazons, who prevailed upon him to refrain 
from invading her country. When getting near India, he 
came on the talking trees sacred to the Sun and Moon, who 



80 MEDIEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 

prophesied many things to him — among others that he should 
die if ever he entered Babylon. Further on, he came to the 
land of the gryphons, and having caught several of the winged 
monsters, made an unfortunate experiment in aviation, on 
a car drawn by four of them, which nearly ended his life. 
Charming pictures of this incident may be found in many 
illustrated copies of Romance of Alisannder. 

It is interesting to find that he took with him throughout 
his campaigns the philosopher Aristotle, as a sort of com- 
bination of intelligence officer, engineer and magician. The 
name philosopher had acquired in the Middle Ages a sort of 
secondary meaning which often amuses us. It was a general 
idea that philosophers as a class had always been addicted 
to dabbling in the Black Arts. Any acquaintance with 
natural phenomena or mechanical devices was in the Middle 
Ages liable to lead to a suspicion of nigromancy. For 
astronomy was hardly distinguishable from astrology, spells 
were supposed to be part of medicine, and any successful 
application of mathematics or mechanics to daily life was 
thought uncanny. So when the medieeval writer ran across 
a philosopher in ancient history, he at once suspected him 
of being a magician. Socrates suffered heavily in reputa- 
tion because of his little inhibitory dcu/uoviov — the personi- 
fied conscience which warned him against dishonourable acts 
or thoughts. In the chroniclers it became a very concrete 
familiar spirit : " Socrati comes et instructor fuit daemon quidam^ 
as we are told, and it taught him strange knowledge. He 
was once sent for by Philip of Macedon to ascertain the reason 
why a certain valley of Macedonia was unhealthy, and dis- 
covered by the advice of his spirit, and some operations with 
reflecting mirrors, that the cause of it was the pestilential 
breath of two dragons who dwelt therein. They were killed 
by a wily trick, and the region became habitable. Alas, 
that Socrates was not forthcoming when the British Army 
suffered so heavily in 1917 from the poisonous exhalations 
of that Macedonian lake Tachinos, which gave it so many 
thousands of malaria-casualties ! But Aristotle was a much 
better-known figure than Socrates, and has a whole romantic 
history to himself, involved with that of Alexander. He is 



MEDLEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 81 

said to have been the child of one of those spirits which are 
called incubi, because of the marvellous powers of his body 
and mind. As an example of his arts, we read that when 
Alexander was besieging a certain oriental city, many of 
his soldiers fell dead without any visible wound. He called 
together his philosophers to investigate this distressing pheno- 
menon. Aristotle replied that " they die because on the walls 
of this city is a basilisc, whose look infects them, and they 
die suddenly because of the death-dealing power of his eyes." 
A simple remedy was at once devised by the philosopher, 
who ordered a very large mirror to be paraded before the 
walls. The basilisc 's curiosity was roused — he looked out 
into it, and perished at once, slain by the reflection of his 
own death-dealing glances. And so the city, deprived of 
its strange protector, fell without further trouble. I am 
sorry to say that the moral character of the Stagirite suffers 
sadly in these romances — there is a weird tale of the indigni- 
ties to which he was subjected by his mistress — of which 
you may sometimes see a representation in early Renaissance 
pictures. When Aristotle died he was interred together 
with his books of magic in a tomb constructed by himself, 
and guarded by a spell which prevents any one from being 
able to approach the place. We are, however, assured that 
in a future age Antichrist will discover a way into the tomb, 
and by means of the knowledge of the Black Art contained 
in the books will make himself for a time master of all the 
world. 

Alexander the Great perished, poisoned by his generals 
Antipater and Cassander, who prepared for him a draught 
of such acid and caustic properties that no metal or earthen- 
ware cup could hold it, but only a receptacle of horn made 
from the hoof of a horse. They drugged then master with 
it at a feast, and his inner parts being burned up, he died 
immediately. With his end eomes a very dry section of 
ancient history, where the late Roman epitomists direct the 
narrative, with occasional help from the pages of Josephus 
and Livy. The only really startling legend that I know of 
attributed to the period of the decadent Macedonian empire 
is that of Apollonius, Prince of Tyre, from which was drawn 

U.C.D. G 



82 MEDLEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 

the plot of the " Pericles " attributed to Shakespeare. It 
first appears in the Pantheon, or Universal Chronicle, of 
Godfrey of Viterbo, and may be found at length in that 
strange collection of pseudo-historical gleanings, the Gesta 
Romanorum. 

We can now turn to the mediaeval views of Roman his- 
tory. For the beginnings of the Roman state the mediaeval 
chronicler had a splendid and most authentic authority — 
the iEneid, taken very naturally as a versified chronicle of 
primary importance. But there was much useful informa- 
tion also to be picked up from the first book of Livy. And 
it may be noted that the tale of early Rome is often told 
in strict parallelism with the tale of early Britain, ruled like 
Rome by kings of undoubted Trojan descent, whose eventful 
reigns could be excerpted from Geoffrey of Monmouth. 

In early Roman annals there is by no means that constant 
and persistent interference of divine personages with the 
course of events which is to be found in the mythical age 
of ancient Greece. The supernatural incidents of the iEneid 
— the strife of Juno and Venus and the rest — can be cut out 
without any injury to its plot. Still gods and marvels do 
occur : but they could be dealt with after the manner of 
Euhemerus, e.g. the story of the divine parentage of Romulus 
and Remus can be simply explained in a light not very favour- 
able to Rhea Silvia. Numa's visits to the nymph Egeria 
are simply consultations with a " wise woman," which were 
common enough in the Middle Ages — and so forth. Some 
odd side-issues, however, get into early Roman history from 
an unexpected source — local folk-lore. There had grown 
up a whole series of legends concerned with the shattered 
monuments of ancient Rome, which pilgrims visited, and 
concerning which cicerones had devised tales so popular that 
they gradually invaded history. The one concerning Trajan 
and the unfortunate widow, mentioned by Dante, and some- 
times illustrated in Renaissance pictures, seems to have origin- 
ated from the same statue which now adorns the Capitol 
steps, though in the Middle Ages it stood near the Lateran. 
This equestrian figure of Marcus Aurelius — an admirable 
portrait — seems to have had before it in its original sm> 



MEDIEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 83 

roundings a small kneeling figure, since removed when it 
was remounted in its present position in the sixteenth century. 

Now, oddly enough, the statue got wrongly identified, 
not only with the Emperor Trajan, and also with the Emperor 
Constantine, but (what is really astounding) with the early 
republican hero Marcus Curtius, the man who leaped into 
the supernatural abyss which opened in the Forum. 

Hence we get two diverging tales. Rome was once besieged 
by a tyrant, a king of Messina, who had subdued all Italy, 
not so much by his arms, for he was small in stature, almost 
a dwarf, but by his skill in Art Magic. For he laid on his 
enemies a spell which made them unable to lift a weapon 
or strike a blow. No man could hurt him. When the city 
was in these straits, a young man named Marcus Curtius 
discovered a way out of the difficulty : the spell did not 
affect animals. Having discovered that the tyrant was 
wont to go every morning to a secret place apart from his 
army, to renew his spells, he rode out secretly at dawn, caught 
the enemy unawares, and trampled him to death under the 
hoofs of his horse. The Romans in honour of Curtius put 
up this statue, representing him in the act of riding down 
the quailing sorcerer. Here it is easy to see that the legend 
is made to explain the statue : but what is not so easy is to 
see how it came to be connected with Curtius — save indeed 
that there are horses in both the stories. But here comes 
in the oddest part of the tale — some one rightly identified 
the statue as that of Marcus Aurelius ; but the only result 
of this was that in some versions of the story the name of 
the philosophic emperor is substituted for that of the repub- 
lican hero, and he is credited with the heroic leap into the 
burning gulf. 

The perfectly ludicrous form in which the story has taken 
shape in that egregious collection of anecdotes, the Gesta 
Romanorum, is as follows : "In the midst of Rome a chasm 
opened, which no human efforts could fill. The prophets 
consulted the oracles, and found that unless some man should 
voluntarily commit himself to the abyss it would never close. 
Proclamation was made, inviting a man to sacrifice himself 
for the general good, but with no effect till a knight named 



84 MEDIEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 

Marcus Aurelius said : "If you will permit me to live as I 
please for the space of one year, I will at the end cheerfully 
surrender myself to the yawning chasm." The Romans 
assented with joy, and Aurelius indulged for that year in every 
wish of his heart. Then remounting his noble steed he rode 
furiously into the gulf, which immediately closed over him." 
I should much like to know what would have been the real 
Marcus Aurelius' conception of a pleasant " year off." Of 
one thing I am sure, — it would have much surprised any 
mediaeval knight or annalist. 

But to return to early Roman history. When we read 
of the sack of Rome by the Gauls, we are rather surprised 
to find that they were not Gauls at all, but Britons. Their 
leader, Brennus, was ignorantly supposed a Gaul by the 
Italians, merely because he came over the Alps. He was 
really a British prince, the brother of King Belinus, who 
is best known to the mediaeval chronicler from his having 
left his name to Billingsgate, in London. Expelled for rebel- 
lion by his brother, Brennus and his band wandered through 
the West, picking up recruits here and there, and finally 
ended by sacking Rome and setting up " Cisalpine Gaul " as a 
British colony. It was rather unfriendly of him to attack 
the Romans — since he and they descended from two Trojan 
cousins — ^Eneas, and Brutus the conqueror of Britain. 

Owing to the impudence of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the 
father of all this British pseudo-history, we regularly find 
the uncouth names of fictitious kings of the house of Brutus 
the Trojan cropping up in the chronology of universal his- 
tory for some 900 years before Christ, among the kings of 
Judah and the consuls of the Roman Republic. The wars 
of Ahab with Benhadad of Syria are agreably sandwiched 
in among the woes of King Lear ; Xerxes and Aristides were 
not far from contemporaries of Molmutius Dunwallo, Britain's 
first legislator, and King Lud (who has left his name to Lud- 
gate Circus and Ludgate Hill) might have paid a visit to Sulla, 
if his inspirations had taken him on the same path as the 
adventurous Brennus. 

Later on, the Biblical tradition, and excerpts from 
Josephus, impinge in many places on Roman history. 



MEDIEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 85 

Pompey the Great, we are assured, lost his good fortune 
on the day when he persisted in entering the Holy of Holies 
at Jerusalem, despite of the protests of the High Priest. 
But Caesar was, of course, a much more eligible subject for 
mythical adornments. Was there not even a " Romance 
of Julius Caesar " ? All the portents which attended his 
career are carefully recorded — including the gigantic phan- 
tasm which opposed him as he crossed the Rubicon. But 
perhaps the oddest is a statement that after his death, though 
he had been killed by more than twenty dagger-thrusts, 
his body did not show the mark of one single wound. As 
Cicero was a contemporary of Caesar, I may mention that 
his name Tullius was confused with that of Tullus Hostilius, 
fourth king of Rome, so it is recorded of him by Higden that 
he was a Volscian by birth, who was wholly illiterate in his 
youth, and tended the flocks of the Roman people on lonely 
hills. Beside his dealing with the conspiracy of Cataline, 
and certain sarcastic epigrams, which have drifted down 
from early epitomists, the most interesting thing that I can 
find about him is that he had a wonderful power of penman- 
ship, and wrote the whole of the Iliad in such small 
compass that the manuscript could go into the shell of a 
walnut ! 1 

With the coming of the Roman Empire we get into a very 
peculiar atmosphere. The all-important problem that pre- 
sented itself to many mediaeval minds — for example to that 
of Dante — was whether Julius Caesar was to be considered the 
first legitimate Emperor of Rome, the starter of the great 
series of names which theoretically ran down to Frederick 
of Hohenstaufen and Henry of Luxemburg, and which was 
surrounded with a halo of time-honoured glory — or whether 
he was not a military usurper who had destroyed an ancient 
constitutional republic. Dante evidently opted for the 
former view, as a consistent Ghibelline : since he placed 
Brutus and Cassius as traitors in that innermost and hottest 
corner of his Inferno, the mouth of Satan himself. But 

1 Is this tale suggested by the Shorthand system {" Tironian Notes "), 
of which Cicero was the first to make use ? 



86 MEDIEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 

there was a strong tendency of the other kind in the air — 
some regarded Brutus and Cassius as tyrannicides and vindi- 
cators of liberty, and Caesar as an ambitious person who met 
a deserved fate. It had been the view of the Roman senate 
— and became again the view of mediaeval republican Italy, 
where emperors and tyrants were the foes of civic liberty, 
and civic patriotism was the ideal. 

In the reign of Augustus Our Lord was born, and in 
consequence we have from his time onward a new series 
of sources which were at the disposition of the mediaeval 
chronicler — the Apocryphal Gospels and the Lives of the 
Saints. From these come a series of anecdotic episodes, 
which, when absorbed into the general flow of the Roman 
annals, produce some amazing variants on received history. 
Augustus, as several famous Italian pictures show us, received 
a visit from the last authentic Sibyl, who showed him the 
Virgin and Child in a vision. At the same time a magic 
statue that was to stand till the Lord of all the World was 
born, fell to pieces, and a miraculous fountain of oil sprang 
from the earth on the Janiculum. The emperor did not live 
long enough after to see the development of the divine career 
of which such early information was thus vouchsafed to him. 
And we need not modify our views as to his character or reign 
from the new lights vouchsafed to us. 

But when we approach Tiberius, we must cast away all 
our preconceived ideas drawn from Tacitus and Suetonius. 
He was the wisest and justest monarch that Rome ever saw, 
according to the Gospel of Nicodemus, a primary authority 
for his reign : but he was afflicted with a sore disease, 
scrofula or leprosy. Now when Pontius Pilate had permitted 
Our Lord to be put to death, he was stricken with fear and 
remorse, and sent an account of the whole matter to the 
emperor, together with the seamless coat of Christ. Tiberius 
was much affected by the letter, but no sooner had he handled 
the Holy Coat than his disease left him. Recognizing the 
miracle, he at once acknowledged the divinity of Our Lord, 
and sought to place his statue among those of the gods in 
the Pantheon. This was strenuously resisted by the senate, 
whose obstinacy so provoked the emperor, that " in senatum 



MEDIEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 87 

saevissime grassatus est." * He slew many recalcitrant mag- 
nates — in revenge for this the later Pagan writers have vilely- 
maligned him, and represent him as drunken, profligate and 
cruel. His end followed not long after — one night as he 
walked by the temple of Isis on the river's bank, he fell in, 
or perhaps was pushed in by conspirators. This, we read 
to our astonishment, is the incident from which the river 
Tiber got its name. We are not informed what was its earlier 
appellation — nor how Livy and Cicero, both accessible authori- 
ties, persisted in calling it Tiberis before Tiberius was born. 

Though the chronology may seem strange, and the 
parentage surprising, Vespasian, we are assured, was a prince 
of Galatia during the reign of Tiberius. His early experi- 
ences with regard to Christianity supply a curious parallel 
to those of his sovereign. One of the early apostolic teachers 
preached at his court : he was converted and baptized. Now 
Vespasian had from his infancy been troubled with a dreadful, 
even a loathsome, affliction. " Quoddam genus vermium 
naso insitum ab infantia gerebat, quae vespae sunt dictae. Et 
inde a vespis dictus est Vespasianus." Now when Vespasian 
had been baptized, suddenly all these vespae fell 
from his nose and died. Determined to show his thankful- 
ness for the miracle, and fired with horror at the story of 
the Passion and Crucifixion, he sought Rome, and obtained 
from Tiberius Csesar permission to destroy the Jews and the 
wicked city of Jerusalem. It was granted : and for many 
years he was getting together an army for this purpose — 
apparently all through the reigns of Caligula, Claudius, and 
Nero — a slow mobilization of over thirty years ! Finally 
he approached Jerusalem with a copious host, and wreaked 
on the Jews vengeance for their crime. He had hardly com- 
pleted his task when messengers arrived from Rome to 
salute him as emperor — the wicked Nero being dead. 

Lest you should think of Vespasian as merely the enthusiastic 
leader of an early Pogrom, I must present him to you in 
another aspect. The Gesta Bomanorum endows him with the 
character and legend of Minos. He is said to have been exces- 
sively unreasonable as to the marriage of his daughter, who 
1 Slight traces of this story occur as early as Orosius ! 



88 MEDLEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 

bore not the very Roman name of Aglae, and was wont to 
turn all suitors for her hand into a labyrinth, where after fruit- 
less wanderings they were devoured, not however by a mino- 
taur but by a lion. His daughter took pity on a certain attract- 
ive knight, and gave him an endless clue of silk, which saved 
him from the intricacies of the labyrinth. But the way 
in which this first-century representative of Theseus gets 
the better of the lion is charmingly mediaeval. He prepared, 
we are told, a very large ball of the very stickiest glue, and 
when the lion rushed on him, popped it into the monster's 
yawning jaws. The creature gave one munch, and immedi- 
ately found his mouth hermetically sealed. The knight then 
easily disposed of him, and made his way out of the labyrinth 
by means of the clue. 

I might go on for some time giving further examples of 
the way in which the most time-honoured folk-tales of the 
general stock are fitted on to well-known Roman emperors 
— Trajan, Hadrian, Aurelius, Constantine — or in which their 
characters have been transformed, in order to fit in to some 
episodes from the lives of the Saints. But I will not go on 
to tell you how " Domitian was a very just and merciful 
prince," or how Philip (the murderer of Gordian III) was 
the first Christian emperor — a very early tale, for St. John 
Chrysostom says that he carried out a penance imposed on 
him by Babylas, bishop of Antioch, — or how Maximian " was 
a very gentle and peaceful emperor " : on the other hand 
Julian the Apostate, for whom mediaeval chroniclers con- 
ceived that nothing was too bad, is in one history made to 
enact the whole appalling career of (Edipus. Suffice it to say 
that all through the centuries before the Renaissance, in 
the days when no criterion of historical values existed, and 
all sources were regarded as about equally credible, the 
reading of the Roman annals in any universal history presents 
to the student the most unrivalled opportunities for getting 
new, startling, and wholly unreliable side-lights on the men- 
tality and adventures of his oldest Roman friends. I some- 
times hope that it may be granted to me, in some improbable 
moment of leisure, to write a general narrative of the first 
three centuries of our Era, in which no authentic sources 



MEDIEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 89 

whatever shall be employed, and the Gesta Romanorum and 
Geoffrey of Monmouth shall form my most precious authorities. 
Without going into Imperial scandals on the one side, 
or hagiography on the other, I may conclude this disserta- 
tion by one short note on the greatest figure of Roman history 
— neither an emperor nor a saint, but simply " Magister 
Vergilius," poet and necromancer. Why the author of the 
iEneid and the Georgics should have become such a dominant 
figure alike in history and fiction it is hard to discern — 
but he not only accompanies Dante in his awful visit 
to the other world, but pervades many lighter tales in a less 
majestic capacity. Some think that the profound respect 
for him as the one great surviving poet from the classical 
tradition, caused him to be invested with supernatural honours, 
much as Homer was deified in ancient Greece. Sometimes 
he is next door to a Christian saint, and by an ingenious 
perversion of well-known passages in his works foresees the 
Christian not the Augustan Golden Age, and sings not of the 
young Marcellus but the Messiah. Serious modern commenta- 
tors have maintained that he took a glimpse into the Jewish 
scriptures. More often he becomes supernatural indeed, but 
not saintly ; he is a first-class necromancer — " a dealer in 
magic and spells, in ever-filled purses, in blessings and curses, 
in prophecies, witches and knells." The names of his mother 
and grandfather, Maia and Maius, were corrupted into Maga 
and Magus, so that he could be said to have been reared by 
ancestors skilled in the Black Art. The incantation scene 
described in the eighth Eclogue was supposed to imply an 
over-great knowledge of incantations in the poet himself. 
But whatever was the origin of the belief , it led to the most 
marvellous stories, which introduce Vergil as a mighty mechani- 
cian and enchanter, superior, perhaps, even to Aristotle him- 
self. He made an invisible wall of compressed air to surround 
his garden which kept out trespassers without their being 
able to understand why they could not get through. He also 
could rear a bridge of air to carry him wherever he chose to 
go. Naples, we are told, being troubled with a plague of 
water-leeches, Vergil fashioned a golden leech, which being 
thrown into the water proceeded to deliver the city from its 



90 MEDIEVAL VIEWS ON HISTORY 

pest, by devouring all the natural ones. He fashioned for 
Augustus a set of images called " Salvatio Romse." They 
consisted of representations of all the provinces of the Roman 
Empire, each bearing a bell in its hand. They were endued 
with such mystic power that when any region was planning 
rebellion, the image personifying it commenced to ring its 
bell, and did not stop doing so till the emperor had taken 
notice of it. Thus Augustus was enabled to direct timely 
measures for the repression of any sedition before it had time 
to come to a head. This suggests a primitive adumbration 
of the idea of wireless telegraphy. But more surprising 
still is it to find that Vergil also made for the Emperor Titus — 
he must have been a centenarian by this time — a still more 
useful machine — an image that, by the mysterious powers 
with which it was endowed, communicated to the emperor 
all offences committed in the city in secret. The illustrative 
anecdote which follows shows that it revealed even such a 
trifling breach of the law as working on a public holiday. 
So great was the consequent unpopularity of the machine 
among habitual offenders, that Titus had to place a guard 
of soldiers over it, to prevent it from being broken at night. 
How convenient it would be if England could be endowed 
by some modern Vergil with an automatic and infallible 
secret police information department ! 

Vergil working in the reign of Titus is surprising — but 
how much more is it to find in the Eulogium Historiarum under 
the year-date 548, and in the Pontificate of Silverius II, the 
note " Hoc Anno Virgilius Neapoli sepultus est, cum libro 
suo." He must have survived, then, for some six centuries, 
and like Aristotle before him, and Michael Scott after, was 
buried with his book of spells — which have been sought by 
many but never found. 

Truly there was a time when history could not be called 
a dull science, nor its votaries styled pedants lacking in 
imagination ! 



V 
A FORGOTTEN HERO : BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 

" Let us now discourse of the illustrious Basil Digenes 
Akritas, the rose of Cappadocia, the most handsome and 
valiant of all the warriors of his day, who subdued the 
castles of rebels and the cities of infidels till his fame extended 
over all lands as far as Euphrates. Cease, vain singers, 
to chant the old lying tales about Hector and Achilles. 
Remember that Alexander the Macedonian conquered the 
world by the power of his mighty brain and the manifest 
help of God, but in personal strength and courage was no 
greater than other men. Above all sing no more of Philo- 
pappus and Cinnamus and the much-praised Joannikius — 
bold outlaws all, I grant, yet boasters who magnified their 
own exploits. But the feats of arms of Basil the Warden 
of the Marches are genuine and well-attested, and let no 
man refuse his credence to them." 

So sang the eleventh-century bard concerning his hero, 
the champion of a great empire that was about to fall, the 
protector and patron of a Christian land that was to pass 
a few years later into the hand of the all-destroying Turk. 
For three generations after Basil's death the old Byzantine 
boundary, which had stood firm against the shocks of five 
hundred years of constant war, gave way at last. The 
infidel broke in, and there was an end of the Cappadocia 
that the poet knew, with its towering castles, its palaces 
of marble and mosaic, its golden churches, and its ancient 
and turbulent feudal aristocracy. We cannot even identify 
the towers and passes, the streams and villages round which 
the tale of Basil's life-work is centred. When next a Chris- 
tian army toiled over those uplands — it was the way-worn 
marching column of the First Crusade — Cappadocia was a 
land of ruins, scantily peopled by the migratory hordes of 

91 



92 BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 

the Seljouks. A local civilization had vanished, of which 
the lay of Basil the Brave gives the only remaining detailed 
picture. 

That a Byzantine frontier-baron might be a hero of 
romance is still a somewhat unfamiliar idea. The very 
word Byzantine has a flavour of decadence and contempt 
about it. The tale of the Eastern Empire still bears the 
slur which the malignant Gibbon laid upon it, and its states- 
men and soldiers are still conceived as Walter Scott drew 
them in his Count Robert of Paris. Specialists only read the 
monumental works of Finlay or of Schlumberger, and realize 
that the men who beat off Persian and Saracen, Slav and 
Bulgarian and Russian, for generation after generation, 
were not wholly effete or wholly vile. 

Basil Digenes Akritas was in nowise a Byzantine noble 
of the type which Gibbon loved to paint. He did not sit 
at Constantinople employed in palace intrigues and slavish 
courtiership, and working by hook or by crook to win some 
grotesque title, such as Grand Drungiary, or Protospathiarius, 
or Logothete of the Post. He never visited Constantinople 
indeed at all so far as we know, and was purely provincial 
and military in his tastes — a hard-working and hard-fighting 
Warden of the Marches, whose individuality, for one reason 
or another, so much impressed his contemporaries that the 
memory of him was preserved not only in the ten-canto epic 
which bears his name, but in proverbs and folk-songs, of 
which some fragments remain. Two centuries after Basil's 
death, the poet Theodore Prodromus could find no better 
compliment for the knightly emperor Manuel I, than to call 
him " the second Akritas," and in another passage sighed in 
vain for a blow from the iron mace of the departed hero to 
sweep away the luxury and self-indulgence of his own day. 

Yet, putting poetry and folk-tales aside, we know uncom- 
monly little of the real Basil Akritas. He can be compared 
with absolute accuracy to the typical paladin of the Court 
of Charlemagne. Roland, the hero of romance, has quite 
driven from men's memory the true " Rhotlandus comes 
limitis Britannici " who fell at Roncesvalles. And similarly 
Basil, the queller of Amazons and the slayer of dragons, 



BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 93 

has eclipsed the tangible Digenes Akritas, the Warden of 
the Cappadocian March, and one of the trusted generals of 
the Emperor Nicephorus Phocas. 

Before we pass on to the Basil of Romance, we may as 
well dismiss the real soldier of the Eastern front, who is a 
much less interesting figure than his glorified epic shadow. 
From the eighth century to the eleventh the house of Ducas 
was without dispute the oldest and noblest in Cappadocia. 
It claimed to descend from a Roman " dux," a comrade and 
kinsman of Constantine the Great. The genealogy is more 
than doubtful for its first three hundred years, but from 
the eighth century onward there is no doubt that it gave 
many good generals to the Byzantine army. And in the 
eleventh two emperors, who gloried in the family name, 
sat on the throne of Constantinople. The local greatness 
of the clan of Ducas, and its ambitions, made it a mark for 
the hatred of several of the princes, sprung from other and 
less noble houses, who ruled the East-Roman realm, and 
especially those of the Macedonian dynasty who reigned in 
the tenth and eleventh centuries. Leo VI, mostly unjustly 
called Leo the Wise, and his favourite Samonas so harried 
Andronicus Ducas, the head of his house in 908, that he 
threw up his allegiance to the empire, and retired with his 
family and his retainers into the heights of Taurus, there 
to dwell as an outlaw. While he, his sons, and his men-at- 
arms were absent from their camp, it was surprised by the 
Emir Mousour, one of the Wardens of the Caliph's western 
borders. Among the prisoners whom the Saracen captured 
was Arete Ducas, the only daughter of Andronicus. From 
the union of parents who first met in this rough fashion, 
the Moslem chief and the captive Christian lady, sprang 
Basil the Brave, whom after-generations called " Digenes," 
the man of two races, because Arab and Christian blood 
flowed mixed in his veins. 

Now Mousour was not all Arab — indeed, his father had been 
a Christian and a fanatic. The last chief of those strange 
Puritan heretics, the Paulicians, who gave the Byzantine 
Empire so much trouble in the ninth century, had been a 
certain Chrysocheir, a desperate rebel, who, when his sec- 



94 BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 

taries were driven out of Anatolia, had taken refuge with 
the Saracen enemy. The Emir Omar of Malatia had not only- 
harboured the exile, but given him one of his daughters in 
marriage. Chrysocheir was killed not long afterwards in 
a reckless foray, leaving an infant son, whom his mother 
brought up as a Moslem and named after her brother, 
Mousour, Emir of Tarsus. He became a famous warrior 
and served his Arab uncle and grandfather as the captain 
of three thousand light horse. For some years he had been 
the plague of the Cappadocian border, and his name was 
cursed as far away as Iconium and Amorium : but he was 
known as a generous and high-minded enemy. 

The sack of the upland camp of the outlawed house of 
Ducas was the turning-point in the history of this young 
adventurer. When the captive Arete was brought before 
him it was a case of " love at first sight." He offered her 
no violence, treated her with chivalrous respect, and when 
her brothers came to seek and ransom her, made them the 
astounding offer that he would cast away his turban and 
receive baptism if they would give him their sister's hand 
in lawful marriage. Apparently the spiritual yoke of Islam 
sat lightly upon him, and he had not forgotten that he was 
the son of a Christian and an East-Roman father — though 
that father had been a heretic and a rebel. The offer was 
too good to refuse — the Emir was welcomed, he carried out 
his promise, was baptized by the name of John, and took 
his wife's family name of Ducas. When, after the death 
of Leo VI in 912 and the civil strife which followed, the 
Regent-Emperor Romanus Lecapenus came into power, and 
the survivors of the exiled Cappadocian nobles were restored 
to their lands and honour, the Emir was received into grace 
along with them, and granted a fief on the border, which he 
now had to defend against his former co-religionists. Where- 
upon the family bard sagely remarked that Love is a power 
inexplicable and immeasurable. " It rescued a captive, it 
stopped a raiding army on its march, it persuaded a hero 
to deny his faith and break his career : and all the world 
marvelled that one fair damsel by charm and sweetness had 
wrecked the most famous of all the war-bands of Syria." 



BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 95 

Of the marriage of John-Mousour and the daughter of 
Andronicus Ducas, Basil " Digenes " was the only offspring, 
though the pair who had first met under such unpromising con- 
ditions enjoyed a prosperous wedded life of more than thirty 
years and lived to see their son become a man of mark. He 
was, like all his ancestors on both sides, a desperate fighter, 
and was made at an early age Warden of one of the " Akritic 
Themes " — i.e. frontier marches in the curious Byzantine 
phraseology. From holding this office and discharging its 
duties with unparalelled vigour and success, Basil got his 
honourable nickname of " the Akritas," the Man of the 
Marches par excellence. His military career was distin- 
guished, though from the scanty mentions of him in the 
chronicles we should never have guessed that it had that 
romantic side which struck the imagination of his neigh- 
bours and retainers. He was present with his contingent 
at the long siege of Edessa in 942, and succeeded the cele- 
brated John Kurkuas as commander-in-chief on the Eastern 
frontier in the same year. He fell into disfavour under the 
reign of that narrow-minded pedant, Constantine Porphyro- 
genitus, but was restored to favour under Romanus II, 
and ruled once more his Cappadocian border-province down 
to the time of Nicephorus Phocas, who treated him with 
great confidence and distinction. Somewhere about the 
year 965 he died, still in vigorous middle age, but having 
most certainly seen more summers than the scant thirty -three 
which the author of the Epic allots to him. Though married 
many years back to a distant relative, a lady of the much- 
ramified clan of Ducas, he left no issue. 

So much for the Basil Digenes Akritas of history. Let 
us now turn to the Basil of Romance. His tale is told by an 
anonymous bard of the early eleventh century, who wrote 
before Cappadocia had fallen into the hands of the invading 
Turk — i.e. before 1071 and the battle of Manzikert. He was 
probably a dependent of some branch of the house of Ducas, 
since he displays a competent knowledge of its genealogy, 
and a great pride in the exploits of its elder generations. 
He was a man of some education, for he quotes Homer as 
freely as the Bible, and alludes not only to heroes known 



96 BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 

from popular folk-tales, such as Alexander the Great, but 
to minor characters of classical antiquity such as Bellerophon 
and Olope. Other allusions and comparisons show us that 
he was also acquainted with a cycle of tales of Byzantine 
adventure which have not come down to us, though they 
must have been popular in the eleventh century, the legends 
of the outlaws of Taurus, whose exploits he continually 
disparages. Had some other local bard been singing of them 
of late, and was the admirer of Basil set on snubbing a rival ? 
But the author of " Digenes," though obviously a man of 
some knowledge and culture, was no historian — he thought 
that Chosroes, the great sixth-century King of Persia, had 
been a Moslem : " He was the first of the sons of Hagar who 
overran Anatolia and came to besiege Constantinople, and 
Omar, the great Sultan was the second." He mixed up 
the two emperors, Romanus I and Romanus II, though 
they lived not more than a century before his own time. 
He makes famous relatives of Basil come to bless his early 
exploits, who had really perished while the hero must have 
been in his cradle. And he thought that Carvas (or Caroes 
as he calls him), the great Paulician rebel-chief, had been a 
Saracen, and not a heretical Christian. But these are trifles 
— the poet was clearly above rather than below average 
contemporary culture. He wrote, however, not in pseudo- 
classical Greek, like contemporary chroniclers, poets, and 
divines at Constantinople, but in the spoken dialect, or " vul- 
gar " Greek, of the eleventh century. Of that tongue his 
work is apparently the oldest serious document that has 
survived. The metre of the poem is what is called " politi- 
cal " verse, lines of fifteen syllables, with a stress laid on 
the odd numbers, the 3rd, 5th, 7th, etc. As a typical screed 
of it we may quote the exordium to Canto VII, wherein 
the bard sets forth the eternal theme that " in the spring 
a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love " — 
very much in the style of Locksley Hall. 

T6v (HaaiXea r&v /j.rjva>v rig (HovXrjQelrj Mysiv ; 
MdioQ E^aaiKevaev slg anavrag rovg [ir}vag, 
K6a\iog avxog (paidgdrarog anaar\g yfjg rv%%avei, 
ndvrcov <pvra>v 6 6<pdaXfi6g xal rcov avdcbv Xa/inQ6rrjg, 



BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 97 

Asifiovcov re neqixaXXtav rb avdog eiaargdnrov 
"Egoira tivesi davftaorov nqo^evov ' A(pQob'nr\g. 
Tors yivcoaxsrai aacp&g rovg vnovgyovvxag egcog, 
Kal nag yiX&v evcpgatverai rrjg rjdovfjg ixey&Xwg. 

We may add that the poem contained ten cantos, and 
that, of these, fragments, amounting to about two cantos, 
are missing, including (unfortunately) both the whole of 
Canto I and the greater part of Canto X, in which the death 
of Basil was recounted. Thus we lack the historical sum- 
mary which undoubtedly started the poem, and all but a 
scrap of Basil's dying speech to his wife, with which it 
ended. 

To give an analysis of the whole poem would be tedious : 
there are plenty of long screeds in this romance, as in most 
others, where the poet gets drawn away into descriptions 
of feasts and ceremonies, of hunting and sportsmanship, 
of the building of churches, palaces and castles, which might 
belong to any other tale ; they may perhaps give the 
atmosphere of the times, but they do not forward the 
story. Doubtless the poet's audience loved to hear the 
details of a particularly splendid marriage dinner, of a dowry 
such as no contemporary father could give his daughter, 
of an ideal castle, or a robe of surpassing magnificence. But 
it is the action of a tale which settles its merit, not its 
merely descriptive passages. 

Action there is in plenty in the romance of Basil Digenes, 
but it is not precisely what we might have expected. The 
main episodes are not concerned with his great regular cam- 
paigns : the siege of Edessa is not even mentioned ; nor is 
his political importance emphasized, though we have an 
interesting account of the visit of the Emperor Romanus II 
to the Cappadocian border, and of the reception which Basil 
made for him. The words of advice which he ventured to 
give his sovereign — very free-spoken advice such as one 
would not suppose that a Byzantine ruler often heard from 
his subjects — run as follows : " Sire, may you and your 
host ever fare well ; but as to the gifts and the honours 
which you offer me, pass them on to less wealthy warriors, 

u.o.d. h 



98 BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 

for I know that the expenses of your empire are incalculable. 
The best boons that a great and worthy king can give to 
his people are kindness for the exile, food for the hungry, 
deliverance for those unjustly oppressed, pardon for those 
who have sinned in thought but not in deed, careful investi- 
gation before any man is condemned. These, great Emperor, 
are the works of righteousness, by means of which you may 
subdue all your enemies. For mere force does not suffice 
a king for the holding down and administering of his realm : 
kingcraft is a special gift from the hand of God Most High. 
And to win the grace of God, I, your loyal servant, as the 
most useful offering that I can make, hereby renounce for the 
term of my natural life all the payments which come from 
your exchequer for the Wardenship of this March. And 
from this day you may dismiss all consideration of them, 
and I pledge myself that your enemies shall be made the 
slaves of your empire." There was undoubtedly in the 
mention of " those who have sinned in thought but not 
in deed " and " those who had been condemned without 
investigation," an allusion to the misfortunes of the elder 
generation of Basil's own family, who had been driven into 
rebellion by false accusations and condemned without a 
hearing. And Romanus, in the poem, catches the allusion, 
and promises, in return for the offer made him, to restore 
all the possessions confiscated long years back, at the time 
of the attainting and forfeiture of Basil's grandfather, 
Andronicus Ducas. 

There is no one of the ten cantos which narrates Basil's 
campaigns against the Saracens, though there are frequent 
allusions to them. " Before his day the Children of Hagar 
often came into Romania, wasting on every side in Charsiana, 
and by Heraclea, and by Amorium and Iconium, even as 
far as Ancyra and beautiful Smyrna and the plains of Ionia 
along the sea. But since the rise of Akritas, the son of the 
noble Emir, the Romans may boast that by the grace of 
God they have subdued all their foes, routing them com- 
pletely. For from the moment when the noble and valiant 
Akritas began his exploits in Syria no enemy dared stand 
against him, and peace and tranquillity reigned throughout 



BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 99 

the borders. Syria cowered before him, and his fear spread 
all over the lands of Babylon." 

But the exploits of Basil which interested the bard were 
his wonderful hunting ; his romantic wooing of his cousin, 
the fair Eudocia Ducas ; his adventures among the " Apelatai," 
the warlike outlaws of the Taurus ; his quelling of the Amazon 
brigand-queen Maximo — an episode obviously borrowed from 
the story of Alexander the Great and Thalestris — and his 
building of his famous frontier-castle on the bank of Euphrates, 
the model of all Byzantine fortresses, whose glories take up 
a whole canto, and are not without interest for those who 
seek for Byzantine views on architecture, painting, sculpture, 
and mural decoration. 

The most striking point about this East-Roman knight 
of the tenth century is that, unlike his western antitypes, 
he is decidedly a cultured person. A Frankish noble of the 
Carlovingian romances might be, like Digenes, a sweet singer 
and a skilled harper, but most assuredly he would not be 
able to read and write, nor have any acquaintance with the 
classics. But Basil's father took the trouble to hire a pro- 
fessor from Constantinople, who for three whole years in- 
structed him in Greek literature as well as the Bible. A 
Byzantine feudal household was apparently a school of polite 
learning — when the lady Arete argues with her son in Canto 
V she not only quotes Thetis's advice to Achilles from the 
Iliad — 

'Et-avda, nr\ xevds raj vq>, ha eldo/xsv a/tcpco, 

but also two lines from the gnomic poets, concerning cares 
concealed. And, in another passage, there is, what seems much 
more surprising, an echo from Pindar, besides several more 
lines from Homer. Scriptural quotations are far more 
numerous, and pervade the whole poem — in one passage 
the Emir, Basil's father, recites the Apostles Creed, very 
accurately rendered into a metrical version, for the confu- 
tation of his Saracenic kinsfolk. 

Altogether Basil is drawn for us as a figure very different 
from the rough Western heroes of his century, and much 
more like a young Italian noble of the Renaissance. The 
picture of him, as he rides forth in early youth in the train 



100 BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 

of his father, certainly recalls the young knights who figure 
on Florentine frescoes and cassones. 

" This marvellous youth had fair curly hair, large eyes, 
a complexion like the rose, dark eyebrows and a broad chest. 
He wore over his light shirt a scarlet tunic with golden clasp 
and buttons, and its collar was embroidered with a pattern 
of pearls. His buskins were gilt, his spurs jewelled. He 
rode upon a white mare, whose trappings were ornamented 
with little bells of gold, which tinkled pleasantly : she had 
a saddle-cloth of green and rose silk, and her reins were of 
gold thread plaited. She was skittish and playful, but 
Akritas had a firm seat and made her obey his will : as he 
cantered along he looked like a rose tossing on its stalk. 
In his hand he held a long Arab lance, of green steel inlaid 
with golden lettering. In the midst of his father's suite 
he shone like the sun among the stars." 

The first exploits of Basil on which the poet dilates were 
in sporting expeditions in the Taurus. Though only twelve 
years old, at his first hunt he faced a bear and brained it 
with a sledge-hammer blow of his fist on the forehead. He 
then ran down a roe on foot and slew it with his bare hands. 
Presently a lioness came across the path. " This is a beast 
that requires the sword," cried his uncle ; " you must not 
think that you can rend her as you did the roe." Basil 
nodded assent, drew his weapon, and when the lioness made 
her spring at him, he stepped lightly aside and clove her 
head right down to the neck-bone. Whereupon the hunts- 
men were struck with awe, and they cried, " Holy Virgin, 
Mother of God ! We witness feats that make us tremble. 
This boy is no child of our world, he is a gift sent from God 
to chastise outlaws and brigands, and he will be their terror 
all the days of his life." 

It was indeed as a queller of the famous " Apelatai " of 
Taurus that Basil made his first mark. The whole border 
was overrun with them, and his father's duty as Warden 
of the passes was unending and incomplete. When he 
reached the age of eighteen he resolved to take up the task 
of outlaw-hunting, stimulated, it is said, by seeing the dead 
carcass of a lion which Joannikius, one of the most famous 



BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 101 

chiefs, had strangled (like Hercules) with his bare hands. " My 
eyes," he said, " must look on the champions who can 
accomplish such exploits." 

So he set out, leaving his suite behind, on foot with no 
arms save a javelin and the iron mace which was his favourite 
weapon. High in the mountains he came upon the water- 
carrier of the outlaws, rilling his skins at a spring, and 
asked him where his comrades lay. " What does such a 
handsome boy want with outlaws ? " said the man. But 
Basil replied that he wanted to become an outlaw himself. 
So the water-bearer guided him to the head-quarters of 
brigandage (to XriaraQxelov), a strange and fearsome lair. 
There lay the old outlaw chief, Philopappus, on a bed piled 
high with the skins of beasts ; his guard were around him. 
Basil gave him polite greeting, and wished him good day. 
" Good day to you also," answered the old man, " but I 
trust, for your own sake, that you are not a spy." " Quite 
the reverse," said the youth ; " I want to become an appren- 
tice-brigand with you in these solitudes." " If that is your 
ambition," said the old man, " you may start your appren- 
ticeship by taking your mace and going on sentry duty at 
the pass. You will stop on duty for fifteen days, during 
which you must take no food or drink, nor allow your eyes 
to close in sleep. That accomplished, you must go out and 
kill me several lions, and bring me their skins as testimony ; 
and then you must go on sentry duty again." " All that 
is much too tedious," said the disappointed youth ; "I will 
not do anything of the sort, but as a proof of my capacity 
I will thrash you all round." So saying he seized his mace 
and fell upon the whole gang ; some he felled with his fists, 
others he knocked over with his mace, and when he had 
got them all down he gathered their weapons under his arm 
and took them to the old man. He threw the bundle at 
his feet saying, " Receive, Philopappus, the spoils of all 
your brigands, and if you are not satisfied, I will give 
you a thrashing also." The chief did not show fight, 
and Basil went down the glen, hunted up his escort, 
and went home rather disappointed with his experi- 
ences. But the outlaws had received a nasty shock, and 



102 BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 

looked forward to the future with considerable dismay. 

The next, or fifth, canto of the poem is by far the most 
interesting of the whole series, being nothing less than the 
first existing version of a notable love story which runs through 
all European romance, and is known in this island in the 
shape of the "Douglas Tragedy" in the Minstrelsy of the 
Scottish Border, and the " Childe of Elle " in Bishop Percy's 
Beliques. Like the latter, and unlike the former, it has a 
happy ending ; but its close kinship to both may be judged 
from the short precis which follows. 

In a neighbouring province of Anatolia there was a governor, 
who came, like Basil, from the great house of Ducas : he had 
three warlike sons and one fair daughter named Eudocia. 
The fame of her beauty was spread over the whole of Roman 
Asia. One day, Akritas had followed the hunt for many 
miles over hill and dale, and got beyond his own bounds. 
His train had been left far behind, and he had lost his way. 
Presently he came on a magnificent castle, and recognized 
that this must be the abode of General Ducas and the fair 
Eudocia. Riding under its wall he sang with a loud voice 
a merry stave": " When a young knight has heard of the 
charms of a lady, and passes by her home without trying to 
cast eyes upon her, I reckon that he is a dull fellow who 
deserves no happiness in this world." The retainers who 
hung about the gate marvelled at his audacity, but mar- 
velled still more at the melody of his voice, which surpassed 
the song of the Sirens. The lady Eudocia was sitting in 
her chamber high up in the castle, and heard the lay. She 
went to her window £Jad gazed down on the young man. 
She could not take her \ eyes off him, and whispered to her 
nurse : " Lean down, my nurse, and look at this handsome 
youth." The nurse obeyed, and answered her unstress : 
" Certainly, my lady, this is the suitor on whom your father 
might look with pleasure, for he has no equal in the whole 
world." And Eudocia continued to stand at her window 
and to gaze upon him. But he, feigning not to see her, 
began to question the retainers at the gate. "Is not this 
the palace of the great General, where dwells the damsel 
whose beauty has been the death of many noble knights ? " 



BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 103 

Now, Ducas himself had heard the singing, and had mixed 
with the group at the gate. Not declaring himself, he spoke 
out of the throng : " Son, know that many young knights, 
seduced by the beauty of this lady, have tried to carry her 
off. But her worthy father, knowing of such designs, guards 
her well : he has laid snares for such criminals : some he has 
beheaded, of some he has merely put out the eyes." 

Now, Basil guessed that this was the General himself, but 
feigned to think that he was speaking to some retainer. 
" Do not suppose, sir, that I am one who comes with dis- 
honourable intentions. But snares, I may say, have no 
terror for me. Would it please you to convey to the General 
my compliments, and to ask of him whether he would accept 
me as a son-in-law. I would serve him as a son should, 
if he would look upon me as does a father." When Ducas 
heard these words he answered stiffly, " You have already 
conveyed your request to the General, and he has not the 
least intention of granting it." 

Hearing this, Basil had no fear, but he spurred his horse, 
rode close under the damsel's window, and cried with a loud 
voice, " Lady, let me know if I have pleased you ; if you 
could think of being my wife send me some token, and make 
me happy and fortunate. But if your desires are set else- 
where, I have no wish to harm you." And so saying he rode 
away, before her father's retainers could interfere. 

Now, the Lady Eudocia had no doubts, and leaned to the 
side of acquiescence. She called her nurse and said : " Go 
down and seek out this young squire, and say to him, ' God 
knows that I like you well ; but I know not your name or 
race. But if, as I think, you are Basil Akritas, you are 
noble and my kinsman. The General, my father, will set 
his guards everywhere, for he knows you and your reckless 
courage. Run not into any peril for my sake, for my father 
is ruthless, and would not spare your life.' " 

These words the nurse bore to Basil ; but how, the bard 
forgets to say. Did the good old lady seek for him in the 
hills — which seems unlikely — or did she send some " little 
foot page," as in the " Childe of Elle " to hunt for him at his 
own father's castle ? Anyhow, the message got through, 



104 BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 

and the young adventurer once more came under the wall, 
and the damsel to her window. " Lean down," he said, 
" light of my life, that I may see your beauty, and that 
your love may descend into my heart. For I am young, 
as you see, and love has never before touched me. I hardly 
know what it may be. But if a desire for me has taken 
your soul, fair maid, then know that though your father 
and all your kin were swords and arrows they should not 
keep us apart." And Eudocia replied, "Go in peace, but 
come again, and do not forget me." 

Now here, unfortunately, we come to a short lacuna in 
the poem. We know that Basil rode home, that he dined 
with his mother, and that she could see that he had some 
weighty matter on his mind, which he would not disclose. 
We know that next evening he called for his big black war- 
horse and rode out armed, with his sword and mace at his 
saddle-bow, and his lyre slung across his shoulder, praying 
that the sun would set quickly and the moon shine bright 
on the roads, for a noble damsel was waiting for him. But, 
then, a page is missing from our sole manuscript — and whether 
Basil entered the castle of Ducas by a ladder of ropes, like 
Lord William or the Childe of Elle, or whether he burst 
open the great gate with his mace and slew the guards, we 
cannot tell. The gap ends — and we find him with the lady 
on his pillion galloping at dawn over rough mountain roads, 
with General Ducas, his three warlike sons, and all his men- 
at-arms in hot pursuit. 

What follows is pure "Douglas Tragedy." The pursuers 
draw so near that it is useless to fly farther. Basil halts 
at a narrow pass, sets down the lady by a great stone, and 
murmurs, " Now, light of my eyes, see if you have a hus- 
band who can fight for you." To which she only answered, 
" Spare my brothers in the fray." When the enemy rushed 
in upon him he charged straight down the road, clove the 
first man-at-arms in two with one blow, and overthrew one 
after another those who followed. " He was swift as a 
hawk pouncing on partridges ; he swooped down and they 
were stricken." But three horsemen drew to the side of 
the road and pushed past him, making for the damsel standing 



BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 105 

by the great stone. Basil swerved and cut in between : 
recognizing them as the lady's brothers he threw himself 
upon them and felled each with a blow of his mace, so nicely 
calculated that it threw them stunned out of their saddles, 
but inflicted no deadly wound. The surviving men-at-arms 
fled. Then arrived the General, whose age had prevented 
him from keeping up with the rest of the party. Weeping 
and groaning he saw his three sons on the ground among 
their slaughtered followers, and Basil standing unharmed 
in front of his daughter. But the knight came forward 
with clasped hands, like a suppliant, and spoke him fair : 
" Lord and master, bless us, your daughter and myself, and 
give us no hard words. Your retainers are rude and rustic 
fighters — they have no skill. I have given them a lesson 
which they will not forget. Grieve not too much, you have 
gained a trusty son-in-law ; search round the world and you 
will not find a better. He is not base-born, nor is he a 
coward, and if you will but set him some task, you may 
judge of his fidelity from the way in which he discharges 
it." 

The General made no further ado. " God has settled the 
affair," he said, "and given me a gallant son-in-law." And 
he proceeded to announce his intention of presenting his 
daughter with a competent dowry — twenty quintals of gold 
bezants, a wide estate, three hundred slaves — including 
fourteen cooks — and a tiara with other precious jewellery. 
Basil would have none of it. "I take your daughter for her- 
self, not for the land or money — give all that to her brothers. 
Her beauty may be her dowry ; I only ask you to accompany 
us to my father's castle and bless our union." The General 
refused to come — it shamed him to appear without his train 
and bridal gifts. In addition, he had three wounded sons 
requiring first-aid — not to speak of some mangled retainers. 
It was hardly to be expected that he would leave them — 
so Basil rode homeward with Eudocia behind him, driving 
in front six good war-horses belonging to the sons and re- 
tainers of the General. The lady, we are told, ventured 
to observe to her lover that she was coming to her new 
home in a somewhat casual and impromptu fashion : brides 



106 BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 

are generally accompanied by their parents and relations, 
attended by their maids and men, and wear their best array. 
To which Basil replied that she need not fret — no one would 
blame her or him, if they turned up all alone, dusty and 
wayworn : the circumstances were exceptional. 

On the enthusiastic reception of the pair at the castle of 
the Emir I have no space to linger. The bard gloats over 
the music and feasting, the presents showered on Eudocia 
by her new relatives, and the subsequent arrival of her father 
with a miscellaneous assortment of gifts. It included twelve 
palfreys, twelve Abasgian falcons, twelve hunting leopards, 
twelve ladies' maids, twelve chambermaids, twelve brocaded 
robes of state, a red and gold travelling pavilion of silk, two 
icons representing the two Saints Theodore set with rubies 
and amethysts, and what we are told pleased his daughter 
most — a tame lion. The lady's taste was odd ! In addition 
he insisted on leaving behind him a large sum of money 
and the title deeds of a handsome estate. 

The marriage festival lasted three months, during which 
the Emir entertained General Ducas, his whole family, and 
his suite. By this time one would have imagined that they 
had seen enough of each other, and that the provinces which 
each was supposed to administer must have been in a some- 
what neglected condition. This would, indeed, seem to 
follow from the fact that, the moment that the General 
turned homeward, Basil had to depart to the frontiers with 
his men-at-arms in order to repress brigandage. "He made 
his raids along the passes, he wounded many outlaws, and 
sent many to Hades. And then the provinces of the ortho- 
dox Romans could get peace, since they had him as their 
patron, guardian, helper, and champion against all enemies, 
after days of so much bloodshed." 

We are bound to confess that Basil, though the most 
uxorious of spouses, must have been a very trying partner 
in life to the fair Eudocia, owing to his settled habit of 
" honeymooning " in inappropriate and dangerous surround- 
ings. Every summer, when Saracens and outlaws had been 
duly dealt with, he was wont to take his wife up into the 
mountains for a prolonged tour. He hated having troops of 



BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 107 

retainers about him, spying out all his ways ; so he arranged 
that a tent was pitched for him in a shady place, while those 
of his escort and his wife's maids were placed far away, out 
of earshot and almost out of eyeshot. When he wanted 
servants, he had a system by which he put up outside his 
tent as many lanterns by night or coloured signals by day 
as he required attendants. Presumably a red lantern meant 
a call for the chief groom, a blue one for the first ladies' maid, 
and so forth. He grew horribly touchy at any violation 
of this rule ; and we are told that his chief cook, having 
once presented himself unasked, received such a box on the 
ears that his eyeballs flew out of their orbits "and the poor 
man remained disabled for the rest of his life." 

Now, there is considerable risk involved in encamping 
some hundreds of yards away from one's suite, when the 
surrounding hills are intermittently liable to visits not only 
from outlaws but from lions, dragons, and devils of the waste. 
The summer outings of the fair Eudocia must have been 
trying things, not to be looked forward to with any great 
pleasure ; — even though the scenery was charming, with 
camping- places on flower- strewn turf, surrounded by tufted 
shady trees, and with a crystal spring rising before the tent 
door, and nightingales singing in all the thickets around. 

Here are some incidents recorded by the bard. One hot 
afternoon Basil slept in his tent, but Eudocia, feeling rest- 
less, slipped out to the beautiful spring at the bottom of 
the glade and began to dabble and dip in the clear water. 
Unfortunately, the glade was the domain of a forest-devil, 
who presented himself in the shape of a beautiful youth, 
greeted the lady, and soon began to offer amorous advances. 
"Hands off, you brute," cried Eudocia, "I am not to be 
touched, and if I scream my lover is asleep close by, and it 
were well that you had never been born if he catches you." 
But forest- devils are reckless creatures — he cast his arms 
around the lady and she screamed for help. Basil awoke 
with a start, seized his sword, and was at the spring in a 
moment — "it seemed as if his feet had wings." The devil 
flung Eudocia aside and turned to fight, displaying no longer 
a human form but that of a three- headed dragon, with a 



108 BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 

long forked tail, vomiting flame from his nostrils. " When 
he snorted it was like thunder, and the neighbouring trees 
shook." Undaunted by this startling transformation, Basil 
fell upon the monster, and after a short combat decapitated 
it thrice. When his retainers, startled by the noise, came 
running up from below, he had only to tell them to drag 
away the creature and throw it over the next cliff. 

This would seem to have been sufficient distraction for 
one afternoon. But we are told that when Basil, still feeling 
an " exposition of slumber " upon him, had retired to his 
couch and dismissed his suite, a lion emerged and began to 
prowl around the tent. Eudocia had to rouse her husband 
again. This time he took his mace, sallied out against the 
beast, and slew it with one stroke on the head, which left 
its hide intact, though its skull was smashed. Again the 
attendants had to be called up, given the lion to deal with, 
and sent away. 

Eudocia now observed that two such adventures in one 
afternoon had upset her nerves, and she wished that her 
husband would give her a little music as a sedative, " Play 
me a tune on your lyre, and raise my spirit, for the fear of 
these monsters has given me a feeling of depression." Basil, 
now well awake, complied with pleasure, and presently 
Eudocia began to sing of love to the accompaniment of his 
harping. 

Unfortunately, the recent disturbance — presumably the 
snorting of the dragon in particular — had attracted to the 
glade a band of outlaws, " three hundred fine young men, 
all in armour." They listened to the music, crept gently 
in toward the tent, and when the concert was over gave it 
a round of applause, and closed in on the musician and the 
singer. Their chief had the impudence to command Akritas 
to give up the lady or be slain on the spot. Their numbers 
were so great that Eudocia in despair cast her veil around 
her face, and cried to her husband that this was the end 
of all things. " But the hero was now thoroughly angry : 
he snatched up his mace and his shield, and flew undaunted 
into the midst of the band. They struck at him but to no 
effect, while whenever his mace descended a brigand breathed 



BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 109 

his last." So many fell that the rest soon fled, with Akritas 
in hot pursuit slaying the hindmost, " He caught them up 
with ease, for he could always outrun a galloping horse — 
as he himself asserted " (says the bard), " not speaking in 
vanity, but wishing to show what gifts the Creator gives to 
certain favoured mortals." When he returned to the tent his 
wife kissed his hand, bathed him with rose water, and gave 
him a good drink — which was certainly well earned. 

Altogether, an afternoon with Basil Digenes certainly sur- 
passed in interest even "an average day in the life of Peter 
Pan." 

We have several cantos occupied with brigand-hunting, 
in which Basil dealt with outlaws wholesale and retail — 
sometimes in single combat with a noted chief, sometimes 
one to three or four, and sometimes in most incredible melees 
with many scores of ruffians at a time, like that described 
above. Affrays with Saracens were rather less numerous 
than those with Christian "Apelatai," but there is one 
Saracen episode which introduces a canto which deals with 
a curious and unedifying problem — quite out of harmony 
with the simple psychology of the rest of the poem. One 
night Basil was sitting with a few of his most confidential 
friends : the talk fell on love, desirable and undesirable, 
and presently he was moved to tell them a deplorable tale 
to show how the lust of the eyes might lead astray even a 
God-fearing man who supposed himself to have an ideal of 
honour, and had no possible excuse for his conduct. It 
was a story which he had better have left untold. 

You will remember, he said, the time when Mousa, that 
audacious highwayman, was the plague of the frontier, before 
I got it into order. I was out after him with my escort, 
when we chanced on him and his band pursuing a young 
man mounted on a mare and leading another horse by the 
bridle. Just as I came on the scene, Mousa caught up the 
fugitive and rolled him out of his saddle by a blow between 
the shoulders : he would have been dead in another moment 
if I had not arrived. Well, we killed Mousa and delivered 
his victim. He was a Roman, the son, as he said, of that 
unfortunate General Antiochus who had been slain with all 



110 BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 

his brigade three years back, in a raid against Aplorabdis 
[Abdurrhadi ?] Emir of Mejafarkin in Mesopotamia. He had 
been taken captive in the disaster, had been a prisoner in a 
dungeon ever since, and had lately escaped. There was a 
large sum of Arabic gold in the saddle-bags of his two horses 
and some jewels also. I handed him over to my men to 
take back to Chalcogourna, from which we had set out. 
But I myself took a cast into the desert by way of recon- 
naissance. I had ridden many miles and seen nothing, 
when I began to feel extremely thirsty. In the distance 
I noted a single palm tree standing amid scrub — this gave 
promise of water, so I pushed for it. There was a spring 
sure enough ; as I dismounted I heard the noise of lamen- 
tation and saw a young woman sitting on a stone by the 
water weeping grievously. She was by her dress a Saracen, 
richly arrayed and of great beauty, but pale and distraught. 
For a moment I took her for a ghost or spirit ; her first words 
were odd — she cried to me, " Has love brought you also, 
for your destruction, into the deserts of Syria ? Come, 
drink of the water and hear my deplorable tale." I tied 
up my horse, leant my lance against the tree, took a draught 
from the spring, and asked the Saracen who she was, and 
why I found her alone in the midst of a desert. 

She replied that she was the daughter of the Emir of 
Mejafarkin, " you will have heard of him — he is the greatest 
of all Emirs." To her sorrow she had fallen in love with a 
Roman captive, long detained in her father's dungeon : he 
said that he was the son of an illustrious general. By working 
on her father she got him released from his chains, and made 
him free of the castle. He swore that he had conceived for 
her a love as great as her own, and that his only desire was 
to get her over the border, and marry her honourably within 
the bounds of the Empire. To make this possible she had 
gone so far as to get herself baptized in secret by an orthodox 
priest. That spring the Emir and his army went out for a long 
campaign : her mother chanced at the same time to be 
stricken with a fever, and there was no surveillance over her. 
So having collected her jewels and taken a large sum of 
money from her father's treasury, she eloped with the young 



BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 111 

Antiochus. They had extraordinary luck, escaped all pur- 
suit, travelled unmolested several days, and had got within 
a long ride of the imperial frontier, when they rested for 
two nights in this desert oasis. On the third morning the 
unfortunate girl was wakened by the sound of horses' feet, 
and sitting up, was horrified to see her lover riding off on 
his own mare and leading away her palfrey by the bridle. 
She called after him to stop, and ran some way in pursuit, bid- 
ding him to remember his promise and their embraces. But he 
spurred his mare and disappeared, without once looking 
back. Returning to their camping-place she discovered 
that he had carried off all the gold and jewels, though he 
had left their food and other gear behind. She had been 
deserted in the most callous fashion, without a horse, in a 
desert place, to become the prey either of lions or of some 
roving bandit. " My punishment is even greater than my 
crime : to go back to my father means certain death ; and 
I have lost my false lover, for whom I abandoned every- 
thing. Give me your sword and let me kill myself, and so 
inflict a merited justice on a wrongdoer." 

Thereupon the poor girl tore her hair and smote her breast. 
I had, said Akritas, the greatest possible difficulty in pre- 
venting her from doing herself some violence. I tried to 
console her with some shade of hope, and said that at least 
I thought that I had caught her fugitive lover that morning, 
and that if she retained any liking for him I would make 
him marry her, that being possible because she had aban- 
doned "the disgraceful creed of the Ethiopians." This 
cheered her a little : I took her up upon the croup of my 
war-horse, and we started to ride toward Chalcogourna. 

For what followed I have no excuse to make. She was a 
most attractive girl — her arms were around me all that after- 
noon — her breath upon my shoulder, her words in my ear. 
Satan is present everywhere, and my conscience was slack 
that day. Desire entered into me by all my senses. We 
camped that night by the wayside, and that camping defiled 
my journey. The old enemy, the Prince of Darkness, the 
adversary of mortal men, caused me to forget God, and the 
vengeance on sin that will come at the Day of Judgment, 



112 BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 

when all secret crimes shall be revealed in the presence of 
the angels and of the whole human race. 

Next morning brought shame and repentance. Arriving 
at Chalcogourna, we found the young son of Antiochus in 
the custody of my escort with all his treasure. I had to 
do something — what was to become of the girl ? I am no 
polygamist and am sincerely attached to my wife. The 
only solution I found was to call up the youth, tell him 
that his desertion of the Emir's daughter had been abomin- 
able, and that he had to marry her. I threatened him with 
my vengeance if he should misuse her or neglect her, and I 
made over to them the great sum of gold and jewels which 
had come from Mejafarkin. I said nothing of what had 
happened by the way — nor, naturally, did the lady. 

And a few days after I went home, weighed down with 
a sinful conscience, feeling a heavy burden of remorse, and 
raging at myself for my lawless lapse. When I met my 
unsuspecting wife I felt loathsome to myself : I had inflicted 
on her the worst of all wrongs. 

So ends the Canto. The only attenuating circumstance 
that I can see for this particularly mean crime is, that Basil 
was a good deal more ashamed of himself than most heroes 
of romance who in similar circumstances dallied by the way. 
It is a curious piece of Byzantine psychology. 

Passing over much more brigand-hunting, it may be worth 
while to speak of the castle which Akritas built for himself 
overlooking the upper course of the Euphrates. The gate- 
house was twenty-four cubits high and adorned with gilded 
reliefs, the outer ward was four stories high and decorated 
with stones of various colours set in patterns. Within there 
was an inner ward, twenty-two cubits high, with bronze 
reliefs and inlaid with precious marbles. The upper stories 
were gilded and the roof was of mosaic work. The state 
chambers of the inner ward had windows surrounded by 
friezes of a pattern of vine branches with gilded bunches 
of grapes. There was a keep set in it which rose to an in- 
credible height. From its battlements one might survey 
all Syria, as far as Babylon. In this keep, approached by 
a newel staircase, was the private hall of Basil, with a 



BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 113 

vaulted ceiling ornamented with marble and pearls, around 
a central boss composed of a large transparent white stone, 
in which there was a light which shone brilliantly at night 
and was visible for miles around. The chamber was square, 
like the keep, and its walls were covered with mosaics giving 
the history of all the famous champions of the world — on 
the one side scriptural subjects, the exploits of Samson and 
of David, of Joshua the son of Nun, and of Moses, and the 
story of Queen Candace. On the other were secular sub- 
jects — the Anger of Achilles, Bellerophon slaying the Chimsera, 
the defeat of King Darius, and all the other exploits of the 
versatile and courageous Alexander of Macedon, and much 
more. 

In the court of the castle was a fountain which threw its 
waters to a surprising height, by means of an ingenious 
mechanism invented by Basil himself. There was also a 
flower-garden and a vineyard, and a chapel dedicated to 
St. Theodore, which had an altar of silver and holy vessels 
of gold. 

" Let none of my hearers doubt of all this because of the 
enormous cost of building such a castle. For princes and 
satraps sent to Basil great presents from afar, and all the 
nobles of the empire gave him gifts in testimony of their 
gratitude for his exploits. The Emperor himself often en- 
riched him with donatives. And no man — Roman or Saracen, 
Persian or Tarsiot — who frequented the passes, ventured 
to cross without his passport. Provided with the seal of 
Akritas any merchant could travel without fear, for the 
outlaws had the greatest dread of him." 

Basil dwelt in prosperity all the days of his life, and his 
only source of chagrin was that his much-loved wife bore 
him no heirs, " for childlessness is a great grief to all men." 
His end was not, like that of many heroes of romance, a 
sudden disaster of blood and ruin. He was still in the full 
vigour of his age when he was stricken with a wasting disease, 
for which the best physicians of the empire could find no 
remedy. According to the bard he had not exceeded the 
age of thirty-three — but history would seem to show that 
he must have been over fifty. For he was born while the 

U.C.D. I 



114 BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 

Ducas family were in insurrection, and some time before 
Romanus Lecapenus restored the exiled Cappadocian nobles, 
i.e. between the outlawry of Andronicus Ducas in 908 and 
the pacification of 919. He died during the reign of 
Nicephorus Phocas, who did not come to the throne till 
963, and not in its earliest years. If Basil was old enough 
in 944 to be put in command of the army of the East, he 
is more likely to have been born in 912 than in 919. 

Whatever his age, he died in his bed, and his wife Eudocia 
did not survive him, for they were buried together. The 
tenth canto, which tells of their end, is mutilated — only 
some sixty lines of its commencement survive. But its 
title-heading runs : " This tenth book of Akritas tells of 
his death, and how his beloved wife died also, and of the 
lamentation of the whole world for them, and of the honour- 
able and worthy funeral which was made for him and his 
spouse." The scrap of the tenth canto which survives only 
gives us the verdict of the physicians, and the commence- 
ment of the last adieu which Basil addresses to Eudocia, 
reminding her of the romantic commencement of their union 
and speaking of their untiring devotion to each other. It 
breaks off in the middle. We may presume that the lady 
died of a broken heart upon his breathless body, like so many 
heroines of romance. For we need not take into considera- 
tion a horrid folk-song of a later age, which says, while 
speaking of the bodily power of Akritas, that he was so 
strong that when, in his dying agony, he gave his wife a 
last embrace he crushed her to death. This, along with 
many other exaggerations and absurdities found in the folk- 
tales concerning Akritas, is quite out of keeping with the poem 
of the eleventh century, which reflects Byzantine culture 
rather than wild folk-lore. It may be noted that it is singu- 
larly exempt from that sort of supernatural and preternatural 
incidents in which early romances generally abound. The 
only exception is the story of the wood-devil, who appeared 
first as a beautiful youth and then as a dragon, in Canto 
VII. The rest of the story is but a glorified transcript of 
the fife of a warden of the Cappadocian frontier march in 
the middle of the tenth century. It may show some faults 



BASIL OF CAPPADOCIA 115 

of taste in the bard, and certain " longueurs " of description 
and repetition, but it certainly gives us a far higher view 
of the spirit of the East-Roman feudal noblesse than can be 
got from any other surviving document. 



VI 
THE CRUSADES 

Ever since recorded history begins, and probably for 
untold centuries before, a never-ending strife between the 
East and the West has been in progress, and the tide of con- 
quest and invasion has been mounting eastward or west- 
ward, only to reach its high-water mark, stand still for a 
moment, and then commence slowly or quickly to retire. 
The writers of the old classical world of antiquity saw this 
clearly enough. Herodotus, the father of all European his- 
torians, began his famous book with a tale of legendary raids 
and counter-raids between Europe and Asia, and traced 
down from them the great war of Greek and Persian 
which had formed the all-engrossing interest of his own 
youth. 

Different nations have led the attack in different ages : 
the Greek, the Roman, the Frankish Crusader, last of all 
the British, on the one side : the Persian, the Saracen, the 
Tartar, and the Ottoman Turk on the other. Three or four 
times Europe has seemed to submerge Western Asia, and to 
plant herself down there so firmly that the lands of the 
debatable zone seemed incorporated for ever with the Western 
world. Alexander the Great, and after him the Romans, 
made so thorough a conquest of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, 
and planted there so deeply the laws and language of the 
West, that it seemed for long centuries incredible that these 
regions should ever slip back again into Orientalism. On 
the other hand the Persians, in the old days before the 
Christian era, the Saracens of Mohammed in the Dark Ages, 
the Tartars of the house of Genghiz Khan in the central 
Middle Ages, the Ottoman Turk in modern times, cut great 
cantles out of Europe and added them to the East. For 
six hundred years Southern Spain was an Oriental land, 

116 



THE CRUSADES 117 

looking to Mecca and Bagdad for its culture and its creed, 
not to Rome and the nearer West. For more than four 
and a half centuries Constantinople and the lands behind 
it were in similar case : it seems that they may be so left 
for a few years more — thanks to the internal jealousies of 
Christendom, which now, as during the last whole century, 
have been retarding the inevitable, and still at this moment 
leave the Sultan — though his baggage has twice been packed — 
sitting by the Golden Horn. 

We are prone to look upon the Crusades as a unique 
phenomenon, because of the predominantly religious character 
of the impulse which in the eleventh and twelfth centuries 
hurled the legions of the Christian West upon Palestine and 
Syria and Egypt. A few generations ago historians who 
regarded themselves as citizens of the world, and presumed 
to look down on the affairs of men from some point of view 
of philosophic cosmopolitanism, taught that the Crusades 
were irrational outbreaks of blind fanaticism, leading to 
endless loss of life and waste of wealth for no adequate end. 
They did not see that the great movement was but one of 
the most stirring and picturesque episodes of the unending 
struggle between East and West. The antagonism between 
Europe and Asia was but taking a new shape, and that this 
shape was for the moment religious was not the fault of the 
West — the first move of that kind had been made on the 
side of Asia. The Arabs whom Mohammed's preaching had 
roused from their deserts, and flung upon the Asiatic and 
African provinces of the Roman Empire, or the Gothic King- 
dom of Spain, had gone forth conquering and to conquer 
with a purely religious war-cry, " God is God, and Mohammed 
is his prophet : the nations of the world must accept the 
Koran, the tribute, or the sword." After more than four 
centuries of subjection to the Mohammedan danger, the nations 
of the West now roused themselves for the due retaliation, 
and an impulse, fanatical in shape as that which had moved 
the Saracens in the seventh century, now launched the 
mailed chivalry of Western Europe against the East, and 
produced the great counter-stroke which made Jerusalem, 
Antioch, and Edessa for a time the capital of Christian states. 



118 THE CRUSADES 

It was one more back sweep of the pendulum, which had 
been swinging to and fro ever since the days of Darius and 
Alexander the Great. The rate at which the pendulum should 
swing forward to East or West, the causes of the coming 
of each wave of new conquerors, the race which might lead 
the van in each invasion, could never be foreseen by the 
wisest of prophets. But the process was always going on ; 
in 1090 it was high time that one of the backward sweeps 
toward the East should begin — as it was high time in 1918 
that the most recent of them all, and that in which Britain 
was for the first time the leader of the movement, should 
take its course. When will the next westward sweep come ? 
And who will lead it ? Can we imagine a formidable com- 
bination between Russian Bolshevism and the Pan- 
Islamic movement ? Or are we to dream of the " Yellow 
Peril," the marshalling of the countless millions of China 
under some military organization such as that of which 
modern Japan has given the example ? I cannot say. 
But I have little doubt that the pendulum will continue to 
oscillate. 

Any history book, however slight and short, will give 
you the formal causes of the first Crusade — it will tell you 
how the Seljouk Turks were thundering at the gates of Con- 
stantinople, and causing the Eastern Emperor, Alexius Com- 
nenus, to utter constant cries for help to the Christian nations 
of inner Europe. You will read how the Turkish governors 
of Jerusalem had been maltreating the pilgrims who (through 
so many dangers and difficulties) were always making their 
way from the Rhine and the Seine to worship at the Holy 
Sepulchre and the manger of Bethlehem. You will be told 
how Peter the Hermit wandered north and south denouncing 
the cruelties of the Infidel, how Pope Urban II summoned 
the bishops and princes of the West to the Council of Cler- 
mont in 1095, and how when he called upon them to punish 
the Turk and the Saracen, and to recover the Holy Places, 
the whole crowd started up crying with one voice, " Dieu 
le veult " — it is the will of God. You know how duke and 
count, baron and knight, man-at-arms and peasant stepped 
forward in unending file to receive from the Pope's own hands 



THE CRUSADES 119 

the cross which the armed pilgrims were to display as their 
special badge, and which gave to their bands the name of 
" Crusaders," and to their enterprise the style of 
" Crusade." 

But this is only the outward and picturesque aspect of 
the movement. It had many other aspects — less spiritual 
and less inspiring, but not less important. It was not the 
fact that in 1095 Christendom was in worse straits than at 
any earlier crisis, and that an expedition to drive away the 
Turk from Palestine was the only way of salvation. Twice 
before, at least, the aspect of affairs for Christian Europe 
had looked much worse. Constantinople had been actually 
beleaguered by the Moslems in 673 and 717, yet no help had 
then come from the West. Pilgrims had often been mal- 
treated before, yet Christendom had not marched en masse 
to revenge their sufferings. The new factor in the world in 
1095 was not the special cruelty or threatening power of the 
Seljouk Turks — whose Sultanate indeed was at this precise 
moment breaking up into fractions, and ceasing to be a danger 
— but the fitness of the West for opening an active campaign 
against Orientalism. Europe was in 1095 in better trim for 
launching a great expedition against the Infidel than she 
had been at any moment since the break-up of the old Roman 
Empire. For the first time for many ages she was in a con- 
dition to turn her main attention to the struggle with the 
East. 

For the preceding three centuries Christendom had been 
engaged in beating off three deadly enemies, whose attacks 
had come all at once. The Vikings from the Scandinavian 
north had ravaged England, Ireland, France, and Northern 
Germany, breaking up survivals of old civilization, upsetting 
dynasties, and sweeping away landmarks. From the East 
at the same time, or a little later, had come the wild Hungarian 
horse-bowmen, the plague which swept along the Danube 
to ravage South Germany -and Northern Italy. And thirdly 
there had been the Mohammedan enemy, still formidable 
and active, though the caliphate had broken up, and though 
the attack was delivered not by one great power but by many 
separate adventurers, Saracen, Moor, and Turk, who worked 



120 THE CRUSADES 

by land in Asia Minor and Spain, by sea in Sicily and Crete, 
even in South Italy and for one short period in Provence. 
There had once been a day in the tenth century when Saracen 
raiders from Fraxinet on the Riviera met and fought with 
Hungarian raiders from the Danube, in the very heart of 
Switzerland, at Orbe in Canton Vaud. It looked as if the 
defence of Christendom had been pierced through on both 
sides. Beset by all three invaders at once, Europe had only 
just held her own for several generations. But the work 
of Leo the Isaurian, of Alfred of Wessex, and Henry of Saxony, 
of Otto the Great, and Nicephorus Phocas had not really 
been in vain. By 1095 Christendom had saved herself ; 
the two internal enemies, the Viking and the Hungarian, 
had not been conquered or exterminated, but they had been 
first beaten off, and then absorbed into the fellowship of 
Europe, by conversion and the acceptance of Christian culture. 
And the worst attacks of the thud enemy, the Mohammedan, 
whose religion made him incapable of being absorbed as the 
Dane or Magyar had been, had been definitely checked on 
all the long front of his attack, from end to end of the 
Mediterranean, save at the extreme eastern point. He had 
long lost all hope of mastering Christian Spain : he had recently 
been evicted from all the islands from which he threatened 
Central Europe — Sardinia, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, were all 
Christian once again. Only in Byzantine Asia Minor had 
a recent breach been made, by that disastrous battle of Man- 
zikert in 1071, which gave to the Seljouk Turks Angora and 
Iconium permanently, and even Nicsea and an outlook on 
to the Bosphorus for a few years. But this last thrust of the 
newest Mohammedan enemy of Christendom was to be an- 
swered by such a counter-stroke as Europe had never delivered 
since Pompey the Great went out to conquer the kings of 
Asia in the first century before Christ, some eleven hundred 
years before. 

There are two ways from Western Europe to the Levant, 
one by sea and one by land. For the last three hundred 
years one of them had been dangerous and the other absolutely 
blocked. The natural road from France or Germany to 
Constantinople and Asia Minor lies down the Danube and 



THE CRUSADES 121 

across Hungary. But since the end of the sixth century 
the plain of the central Danube had been in the hands of 
wild pagan tribes, the enemies of Christendom and civilization. 
First came the Avars, then the still more formidable Magyars, 
the scourge of Central Europe. The passage from Germany 
to Constantinople was absolutely stopped for more than 
three centuries. We must pause for a moment, to realize 
the difference that was made in the geographical situation 
by the conversion of the Magyars to Christianity under St. 
Stephen, in the early years of the eleventh century. The 
land-road was opened again ; for the first time for ages 
it had become possible to cross the continent of Europe, 
and reach the East without leaving friendly Christian 
territory. 

As long as the land-road had been impracticable, the 
only other way of getting from Western Europe to the Levant 
had been, of course, by sea. From the ports of Italy the 
voyage ought not to have been difficult. But for the last 
two hundred years it had been very perilous, as long as the 
Mohammedans had naval supremacy in the central Mediter- 
ranean. While they held Sicily and Sardinia, and even for a 
time Crete and lodgments in Southern Italy, their countless 
swarms of piratical vessels made commerce and pilgrimage 
alike impossible. The Byzantine emperors were, till the 
eleventh century, the only Christian princes who possessed 
a war-fleet, and in despite of it they were driven out of their 
last hold on Sicily, which, when it was (after fifty years of 
interval) won back for Christendom, was recovered, not by 
the East-Romans, but by a new power. In the early eleventh 
century the Byzantine fleet was keeping the iEgean and some- 
times the Adriatic practicable for commerce, but it had failed 
to hold the central Mediterranean. 

So things remained on the side of the sea till the second 
quarter of the eleventh century, when naval enterprise began 
to be seen for the first time in the West. The Italians were 
at last beginning to take to the water and build war-fleets. 
First Venice in North-Eastern Italy, then Pisa and Genoa 
in North-Western, developed into maritime powers, and 
began to oppose and finally to drive away the Mohammedan 



122 THE CRUSADES 

pirates of Sardinia, Sicily, and the Moorish coast. As late 
as 1011 the last great Mohammedan naval expedition sacked 
Pisa — but only a very few years after Pisa and Genoa took 
the offensive and recovered Sardinia from the Infidel. A 
generation later arose the last, and for a time the most for- 
midable, of the Italian naval powers, that established by the 
Norman adventurers (close kinsmen to the conquerors of 
Hastings) in Naples and Southern Italy. In a long series 
of campaigns between 1060 and 1091 they finally drove out the 
Moors from Sicily. Then all the Italian naval powers com- 
bined to hunt down the Barbary pirates, and by 1095 and 
the start of the first Crusade, the central Mediterranean was, 
what it had not been for many ages, once more a Christian 
lake. The enemy was pursued into Africa, and beaten off 
the seas. Safe transit from West to East was at last 
possible. 

Clearly then, by the year 1095, there had been estab- 
lished a wholly new posture of affairs in Europe. It was 
possible to go from France or Germany or Italy to the Levant 
with safety, both by land and by water. It was this con- 
juncture which made the first Crusade a possibility, almost 
a necessity. For already Europe had taken the offensive 
against the Mohammedan enemy in the western and central 
waters of the Mediterranean, and was only wanting a start 
and an impulse to induce her to invade the eastern waters 
also. The new naval powers, both the three republics and 
the Norman Princes of Naples and Sicily, were militant and 
ambitious. 

The thrust of the Seljouk Turks at Constantinople and 
their maltreatment of the western Pilgrims in Palestine were 
sufficient provocative causes. These acts of hostility, which 
early generations would have had to pass over, because they 
would have been unable to deal with them, could be resented 
with effect by the Europe of 1095. That they were punished, 
not merely by isolated expeditions of the Italian maritime 
powers in search of new fields of commercial activity, but by a 
sudden outburst of energy which affected most of the further 
nations of Christendom, was largely due to the statesmanship 
of the Papacy. It was from the first true that " the Crusades 



THE CRUSADES 123 

were the foreign policy of the Popes." It was Urban II, 
who, instead of stirring up merely Genoa and Venice and 
the Normans of Sicily, crossed the Alps and preached the 
Crusade to all Europe. The Papacy, no doubt, had its own 
ends to serve in its great contest with the Emperors of the 
West ; it obtained an immense moral advantage by placing 
itself at the head of a movement whose inspiration could 
not but be approved by all Christendom. The Crusades 
showed the Papacy as a great international power, acting 
everywhere on the subjects of every king, whether the tem- 
poral ruler approved or not. And the ideal set forth was 
one which made the personal ambitions of emperors and 
kings, for themselves or their dynasties, appear local, selfish, 
and mischievous. It is a noteworthy fact that to the first of 
these great expeditions there went forth no sovereign prince 
— neither the Emperor, nor the King of France, nor the 
King of England (imagine William Rufus on a crusade !), 
nor the King of Hungary, but that the subjects of each of 
these monarchs, from great dukes and counts like Robert 
of Normandy, or Robert of Flanders, or Godfrey of Bouillon, 
or Raymond of Toulouse, down to simple burghers and 
peasants, started by thousands for the East, at the papal 
fiat, and with the papal blessing. 

Looking at the fundamental causes which flung the armed 
pilgrims of the West by tens of thousands against the East, 
both by the sea route and by the land route, with the inten- 
tion of taking the Holy Places from the Moslem, we can 
distinguish three impulses — the one religious, the second 
political, the third arising from naval enterprise. The three 
ideals were hopelessly intermixed — many crusaders were 
inspired only by one of them — more perhaps by two — some 
(such are the complexities of human psychology) by all three 
at once. 

No doubt some of the princes and great multitudes of the 
minor pilgrims who went forth to Palestine did so on a genuine 
religious impulse — the same that had been taking a few eager 
souls eastward to the Holy Places at intervals during the 
whole of the Dark Ages, when the enterprise had been so 
far more difficult. It was certainly neither political ambition 



124 THE CRUSADES 

nor commercial enterprise that led individuals, many of whom 
were advanced in age, and powerful and wealthy in their 
own lands, to desert their homes for years, and risk death or 
captivity in the unknown East. In some Crusaders, no 
doubt, simple piety was mixed with the spirit of adventure : 
feudal Europe loved fighting for fighting's sake, as its tourna- 
ments showed : and the desire to chastise the pilgrim-per- 
secuting infidel, or to worship at the primitive shrines of the 
Christian faith, might be none the less genuine because of 
the alluring fact that hard knocks would certainly have to 
be given and taken in the process. 

But along with the genuine pilgrims there went others 
whose aims were less idealistic. From the point of view of the 
Italian republics and the Normans of Sicily, the Crusade 
was undoubtedly a great venture for naval domination and 
commercial exploitation in the Levant. Venice and Genoa 
threw themselves vigorously into the enterprise ; they spoke, 
like their allies, of the delivery of the Holy Places, but their 
action shows that they were mainly set on getting control 
of the great sea-routes to the East. When Syria was con- 
quered, the Italians greedily grabbed every port, to the detri- 
ment of the newly crowned King of Jerusalem, and spent 
enormous pains in diverting to Jaffa and Acre, to Beyrout 
and Laodicea, the Persian and Indian commerce that had 
been wont to go overland to Constantinople. They would 
not allow the feudal princes of Palestine and Syria to get 
any real control of their own harbours, or to tax the imports 
and exports that passed through them. It was this self- 
seeking of the Italians that ultimately proved no small factor 
in the ruin of the short-lived Kingdom of Jerusalem. 

But there were not only religious enthusiasts and com- 
mercial monopolists among the Crusaders. The third element 
was the military adventurers, who were in search of fiefs 
and castles in the wealthy East, — the cadets and landless 
younger sons of all the noble houses of the feudal West, with 
those restless or impoverished landowners who were dis- 
contented with their home conditions. It was these land- 
seeking soldiers of fortune who built up the Frankish com- 
munity in Syria, such as it was. The religious pilgrims 



THE CRUSADES 125 

went home, such of them as had not perished : the mer- 
chants settled down in some seaport, and ultimately went 
home also if their venture had succeeded. The free-lances 
stayed out in the East for good, seized some fief, small or 
great, and fought against the Moslem to retain it or to enlarge 
it, for all the days of their life. Adventurers never ceased 
drifting eastward to the " Holy War " till, in the thirteenth 
century, it became evident that the game was up, and that it 
was more promising as a career to become a captain of mer- 
cenaries, or a professional rebel at home, than to go out to 
be slain by Turk or Saracen on the Holy Soil. 

All the three aims of the Crusaders were attained, but 
at the cost of enormous waste of life and energy, due to two 
main causes — indiscipline and ignorance. The first Crusade, 
as all know, was nearly wrecked because the great invading 
horde was led by no single leader of an eminence sufficiently 
great to command the obedience of his fellows. The crowd 
of dukes and counts, vassals of different suzerains, were 
too proud to obey one of their equals. The host was really 
directed by an unruly council of war, in which every magnate 
urged his own plan, and finally some strategical compromise 
was adopted which pleased nobody. Orders were not obeyed 
— he who chose went off on a side-expedition, or melted away 
from the banner. It is wonderful that the first Crusaders 
ever reached Palestine, or took Jerusalem. More than once 
they were on the verge of ruin, owing to their stupid indis- 
cipline : only their indomitable courage finally pulled them 
through. 

But geographical ignorance was almost as fatal a draw- 
back as want of discipline. The moment that they left 
Constantinople they were wandering about " in worlds not 
realized " — any sort of misdirection was possible in days 
when all East of the Bosphorus was in the land of marvels 
and legends, whose darkness was only lit up by casual oral 
information gathered from stray merchants, pilgrims, or 
prisoners. Even in the Balkan Peninsula the Crusaders 
made strange errors — one army of South French origin actually 
marched from Trieste to Constantinople, through the stony 
mountains of Dalmatia, Montenegro, and Albania, because 



126 THE CRUSADES 

they thought it would be a " short cut," as compared with 
the obvious route through Hungary : half of them died 
before they reached the Bosphorus. There was a more 
disastrous incident still in 1101, when a whole expedition, 
disregarding the advice of the Byzantine Emperor, who 
tried to put them right, strove to march on Bagdad via Armenia, 
by a non-existent route. Most of them left their bones in 
Kurdistan. To be fair, however, to the general intelligence 
of the Crusaders, we must acknowledge that it was always 
the landsmen, — the French and Germans in the first two 
Crusades, the Germans alone in the third, who took the difficult 
and circuitous route across the Balkan Peninsula and Asia 
Minor. Even on the first Crusade many of the Italians 
arrived by water, and when the naval control in the Levant 
had once fallen into Christian hands, it became normal to 
use the sea-route, as did Richard Cceur de Lion and Philip 
Augustus in the third Crusade, and many before them, not 
to speak of St. Louis in the last great venture of the thirteenth 
century. 

Two juxtaposed facts had much to do with the success 
of the first Crusade, and the comparative failure of all that 
followed. The one fact we have already noted — that after 
the final expulsion of the Moors from Sicily in 1091 the 
Mediterranean now offered safe sailing for all Christian 
fleets. The second and simultaneous fact was the break- 
up of the great Moslem State which had been a few years 
before dominating all the nearer East. The power of the 
Seljouk Turks, which had in 1080 been still a single sultanate, 
which extended all over Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, 
and Persia had just fallen apart by civil war into a dozen 
jarring fragments. The last heirs of the great Seljouk monarch 
in Persia were no longer obeyed by the minor sultan in Asia 
Minor, or by the petty emirs who had just made themselves 
independent at Antioch, Aleppo, Damascus, Mardin, and else- 
where. And a power hostile to all the Turkish race, the 
Fatimite sultan of Egypt, had just conquered Palestine. 
Jerusalem in 1097 was held no longer by those Seljouks who 
had recently been maltreating the Christian pilgrims, but 
by an Egyptian governor and garrison. Fighting against 



THE CRUSADES 127 

jealous and divided enemies, the Crusaders only just suc- 
ceeded in conquering Antioch and Edessa, Jerusalem and 
Tripoli. Opposed by a single monarch wielding the resources 
of the whole of Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia, they would 
certainly have failed, and would never have seen the Holy 
Sepulchre, or established the short-lived Latin Principalities 
of the Levant. 

The best proof of this is that the gradual reunion of the 
group of Mohammedan petty states into a single great 
monarchy was the ruin of the Crusading venture. There 
was a bare half-century during which those great fighters 
the Baldwins and Amaurys increased their borders and held 
their own. But at last a Mesopotamian prince named Zenghi 
united the states on each side of the Euphrates, and in 1144 
attacked and destroyed the most outlying Christian prin- 
cipality, the county of Edessa. The last chance for the 
survival of the invaders came five years later, when the King 
of Jerusalem, aided by the depleted armies of the Second 
Crusade, laid siege to Damascus in 1149 — this was the high- 
water mark of the Crusading wave. If the Franks had taken 
Damascus, and cut through completely to the Syrian desert, 
the Mohammedan North and the Mohammedan South — 
Mesopotamia and Egypt — would have been completely 
severed. But the siege of Damascus did not succeed, through 
dissension between the Syrian barons and the Western pilgrims, 
and the stroke failed. Five years later the Emir Nur-ed-din, 
son of Zenghi, conquered his neighbour of Damascus, and 
became master of Southern as well as Northern Syria. His 
state was getting too powerful to be resisted by the little 
Kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1171 the end became inevitable 
when Nur-ed-din annexed Egypt — his generals having made 
an end of the last Fatimite Caliph. The enormous new 
sultanate which embraced Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt 
was too strong to be resisted, especially when its strength 
was wielded by Nur-ed-din's great successor, the famous 
usurper Saladin (1172-1192). He crushed the Franks by 
numbers combined with good generalship, at the fatal battle 
of Tiberias in 1187, and took Jerusalem a few months 
after. 



128 THE CRUSADES 

The overpowering strength of the great Mohammedan 
state thus created was the dominating cause of the failure 
of the Crusades. Minor causes there were in plenty — (1) 
the feudal organization which made the intrusive Christian 
states of Syria, not a single military monarchy, but an ill- 
compacted group of quarrelsome feudatories. (2) The want 
of a loyal and homogeneous lower class to serve as a safe 
basis for society — the tillers of the soil were either discon- 
tented Mohammedan fellaheen, or Syrian Christians, who 
hated the Western Church only less than they hated Islam. 
The army of the King of Jerusalem counted many barons 
and knights, but never enough foot soldiery — the material 
for it was wanting. Only in time of very dire need would 
the Italian burghers of the seaport towns turn out in arms. 
(3) The King was always poor, because the greedy Italian 
maritime powers had only joined in setting him up on con- 
dition that they should have a monopoly of all commerce. 
The lively trade which sprang up profited the Venetian Genoese 
or Pisan factories, not the King's exchequer. The titular 
sovereign had only his small feudal revenue on which to 
depend — not a customs revenue or the power to tallage his 
burghers, on which other princes could count. (4) Geography 
too was against the survival of the Crusading states. If 
the Franks in their first rush had occupied all Syria from 
the sea to the Arabian desert, the Kingdom of Jerusalem 
would have had a defensible boundary. But Aleppo and 
Damascus were never won, and the Crusading states remained 
a narrow coast slip, all frontier, and all equally exposed to the 
enemy. Islam was never cut in two — the route from the 
Euphrates to Egypt via Damascus, Ma'an, and Akabah was 
always open to the enemy, and the doom of the Crusaders 
came precisely from the fact that Syria and Egypt were 
finally joined under a single great monarch, who was altogether 
too strong to be resisted. 

That the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 was not immediately 
followed by the expulsion of the Franks from the Levant 
was due to that much misrepresented enterprise, the Third 
Crusade. It is generally spoken of as a complete failure, 
because it failed to recover the Holy Places. But this is 



THE CRUSADES 129 

to do Richard Coeur de Lion scant justice. He met Saladin 
at the height of his power, when he had subdued all Palestine 
save a few harbour towns, faced him, and recovered Acre, 
then the greatest port of Syria, in spite of all the efforts of 
a great relieving army. He finally beat the Sultan in pitched 
battle at Arsouf, a famous spot again in 1918, for it is the 
precise point at which General Allenby broke through the 
Turkish lines, and started that wonderful turning move- 
ment which won all Palestine in a week, and ended in the 
surrender of 100,000 Ottoman troops. It is true that Cceur 
de Lion failed to recover Jerusalem, owing to the mean fashion 
in which he was betrayed by his jealous allies. But it was 
no small feat to force Saladin to a treaty which left all the 
coast, with its harbours and its castles, to Christendom, if 
Jerusalem and the highlands of the inland had to be abandoned 
as irrecoverable. The best proof of Richard's success is that 
what he had won back was held by the Franks for nearly a cen- 
tury more. At the same time it must be confessed that the 
surviving remnant of the Kingdom of Jerusalem — it was now 
more truly the Kingdom of Acre and Tyre — continued to 
exist for so long mainly as a result of lucky chance. The 
great Saladin died not long after the treaty of peace of 1192, 
and his empire, which had extended from the Tigris to the 
Cataracts of the Nile, broke up for a time, being parted between 
his brother and his sons. This delayed the final ruin of 
the states of Christian Syria for a space, for it is pos- 
sible to make a long fight against enemies who have jealousies 
and divided interests. But the Kingdom of Jerusalem was, 
during its last ninety years of life, entirely destitute of any 
power to recover itself. Nothing but the ports being left, 
the maintenance of the state practically depended on the 
Italian commercial powers, who were deeply interested in 
keeping their profitable factories safe, but had no reason 
to take thought for the recovery of the inland. That would 
have been of no use to themselves, though it might profit 
the Syrian baronage and the titular king. Hence a passive 
defence of the harbours, and truce, and trade if possible, 
with the Mohammedan powers, were their natural 
policy. 

U.C.D. k 



130 THE CRUSADES 

There was still in the earlier thirteenth century some chance 
that succour might come from outside, to reinforce the 
decadent Christian power in Syria. The Crusading spirit 
was not yet entirely dead, and the Papacy still continued 
its consistent policy of encouraging Eastern expeditions 
with the old aims. But the leaders of the so-called Fourth 
Crusade disappointed all Christendom. Instead of rein- 
forcing Palestine, they allowed themselves to be led astray 
by the selfish and intriguing Venetians, went off to the Bos- 
phorus instead of to Syria, and, like pirates, seized, plundered 
and occupied Christian Constantinople in 1204. This was 
one of the greatest crimes of history — perhaps the greatest 
ever committed under the name of religion — and no excuse 
can be made for the greedy Venetians, who lured off the 
princes of the West on a side-issue, profitable to Venice alone, 
but ruinous to the general defences of Christendom. For 
one of its side-effects was to let the Seljouk Turks once more 
into Western Asia Minor, from which they had been driven 
away by the First Crusade a century back. 

There were yet several crusades to come before the Papacy 
and the Christian West finally gave up the idea of the recovery 
of the Holy Places. The Fifth Crusade of 1218 is interesting 
as a strategical variant on all the earlier expeditions. It 
was launched not against Palestine, but against Egypt, on 
a hypothesis which was strategically sound, that a blow struck 
there, at the narrow middle-point of the Mohammedan world, 
would be decisive of the fate of the whole East. For Syria 
and Africa are linked only by the narrow isthmus of Suez, 
and he who could occupy the Nile Delta would cut the 
power of Islam in two. But the blow was tactically mis- 
directed, since campaigning amid the canals and marshes 
of Lower Egypt was unsuited for an army composed of feudal 
men-at-arms, who needed broad plains and pitched battles 
to display their efficiency. The only way to tackle Egypt 
by an invasion from the sea, is to land either west of the 
Delta-Marshes at Alexandria, as Napoleon did in 1798, or 
east of them, as did Lord Wolseley in 1882, and to avoid 
the marsh dangers, by refusing to be entangled in them. 
The enterprise of 1218, though it secured a base at Damietta, 



THE CRUSADES 131 

flickered out among topographical difficulties. Yet precisely 
the same mistake was repeated a generation later, when 
the enthusiastic St. Louis led the great French host of 1249-50 
to perish miserably in a blow at Cairo aimed through the 
inextricable network of the dykes and canals of the Delta. 
His army, thrown ashore at Acre, might certainly have accom- 
plished much in Syria ; if he had landed at Alexandria, clear 
of the water-courses, he might have got forward a long way, 
if he could have solved the problem of transport. But, 
striking at Damietta, like his predecessors of the Fifth Crusade, 
he involved himself in the swamps and water-ways, failed 
in his thrust, was himself finally besieged in his advanced 
camp, and forced to surrender with the wreck of his host. 
It was only after his ransom, and release from Egyptian 
captivity, that St. Louis went to Palestine, and spent more 
than two years in endeavouring to restore concord among 
the Christians, and in strengthening and repairing their long 
line of harbour-fortresses. But he came without the great 
army that he had wasted in Egypt, and, therefore, his efforts 
were of little avail. 

Yet so long as the Mohammedan powers remained divided, 
the Christian coast-power in Syria survived. Once for a 
few years the Emperor Frederic II, by taking part in a civil 
war between the Eyubite princes, recovered Jerusalem by 
treaty (1229), but only the city and the pilgrims' way thereto 
from Jaffa. It was a peace-arrangement which ceased when 
the next war came, and a Turkish army in the pay of the 
Egyptian sultan stormed Jerusalem in 1244 — the last time, 
I believe, that it was taken by fighting till 1917. But this 
rather illusory occupation of Jerusalem for twelve years had no 
military or political meaning : it was a diplomatic rather than 
a strategical achievement ; safe access to the ceded city 
had not been secured, and at the first renewal of war it was 
bound to fall back to the Sultan, whose territory surrounded 
it on every side. 

If it be asked how it came to pass that the Frankish holding 
in Syria survived for forty years after King Louis' fiasco 
in Egypt in 1250, the answer must, I suppose, be that if 
aid practically ceased to come in from the West (though 



132 THE CRUSADES 

one must not forget petty succours like that which the English 
prince, Edward Longshanks, brought in 1270), yet for some 
years after 1250 the Mohammedan central power was in 
trouble. The last Eyubite sultan of Egypt and Syria did 
not survive the year in which St. Louis was defeated and 
taken prisoner. He perished in a mutiny of his mercenary 
troops, the famous Mamelukes, just after his victory. The 
rebels made an end of his family in Egypt, but not for the 
moment in Syria, where many towns held out for the old 
dynasty, but fell to internal strife as to the succession : and 
it was some little time before all the old lands of Saladin's 
empire were united again under Sultan Eibek, the first of the 
so-called Mameluke dynasty. The reign of this short-lived 
prince was disturbed by the threat of a great invasion, not of 
Christians from the West but of Mongols — a new name for 
us — from the East. This vast horde which Genghiz Khan 
had set rolling westward from the borders of China was 
impending as a common danger over the Mohammedan 
East and the Christian East. It was the first serious threat 
from Asia that Europe had seen for 200 years. But it was 
also a threat to Moslem civilization : after sweeping over and 
devastating Persia, the Mongol Khan Hulagu captured Bag- 
dad in 1258, slew (or rather starved) the last Caliph, and 
reduced the ancient capital of the Mohammedan world to 
a ruin. The Mongols then flooded forward into Syria and 
took Aleppo : unless beaten they would next make for 
Damascus and Egypt. The Mamelukes stood fiercely to 
defend the sultanate they had recently mastered, and after 
two years of hard fighting finally achieved a decisive victory 
over the Mongol Khan in 1260. It was only when they 
had saved themselves from this danger that they turned 
at last to the systematic extermination of the Franks of 
the Syrian coast-land. The process took about a quarter 
of a century, for the Christian harbour cities were strong, 
the Italian commercial states had every reason for keeping 
them safe, and the military orders of the Temple and the 
Hospital provided a solid nucleus of fighting power, though the 
old Frankish baronage of Palestine had dwindled away to 
nothing. The process therefore was slow, if sure. Bibars, 



THE CRUSADES 133 

the fourth and perhaps the greatest of the Mameluke sultans, 
captured Antioch, the largest city still in Christian hands, in 
1268, and Jaffa, the southernmost Christian port, in the same 
year. From thenceforward the dwindling coast-slip was 
doomed, and in 1289 Tripoli and in 1291 Acre, the vital point 
of all commerce, was taken by the successor of Bibars. Aban- 
doning the last few sea-castles, the Franks gave up the game, 
and retired by sea to the West. The episode of the attempt 
by Europe to master the Levant had come to a disastrous 
end. No European army set foot in the disputed lands of 
Western Asia again till 1798, when Bonaparte's extraordinary 
and reckless attack on Egypt brought him for a moment into 
Syria, there to be checked before Acre by the indefatigable 
Sydney Smith, rather than by the local Mohammedan power. 
But Bonaparte's raid from the first was an insane tour de force. 
How could he create an Eastern Empire with 30,000 men, 
when he was not sure of his sea-communication with France, 
his only base ? Nelson's victory of the Nile had stultified 
his enterprise ere ever he set foot on Syrian soil. 

It was not the Mameluke conquerors of the last Frankish 
strongholds of Syria who were to be the real gainers by the 
extinction of the Crusading states, nor were they ever destined 
to follow up their success by important offensive action against 
Christendom. During the 230 years for which their power 
was destined to survive, they accomplished no more than 
the conquest of the small Armenian kingdom in Cilicia, and 
some unsuccessful raids on the island-realm of Cyprus. The 
destruction of the Christian states of the Latin East was 
rather a necessary preliminary to the last great Moslem attack 
on Europe by quite another power — the Ottoman Turks. 
I count this the last great swing of the pendulum westward, 
not reckoning the awful but transient inroad of the Mongols, 
which indeed had taken place fifty years before the end of the 
Kingdom of Jerusalem. The year of terror for Western 
Europe had been 1241-42 when the immense horde of Batu 
Khan, after sweeping all over Southern Russia and sacking 
Kief, had entered Poland, beaten its dukes and their East- 
German neighbours at Liegnitz, and then thrown itself upon 
Hungary. The Hungarian kingdom seemed absolutely annihi- 



134 THE CRUSADES 

lated at the battle of the Sajo, " ubi fere extinguitur militia 
totius regni Hungariae," and the Mongols actually pressed 
down into Dalmatia, and saw the waters of the Adriatic. 
But they vanished as quickly as they came, and after one 
winter of acute panic, which spread as far as Italy and England, 
Christendom breathed again. Hungary and Poland emerged 
from the deluge battered but safe, and it was only in unlucky 
Russia, for which Latin Europe had little concern, that the 
effects of the Mongol inroad lasted for generations — perhaps 
spiritually even down to to-day. For Russian barbarism is a 
survival in some sense from the destructive action of the 
eastern savages of the thirteenth century. 

But the Ottoman Turks, not the Mongols, were the peril 
to Europe in the centuries that followed the fall of the King- 
dom of Jerusalem. As long as Christendom had held a great 
outwork in the Levant, and the heart of the Mohammedan 
world was always liable to be assailed by a new Crusade, 
the solid advance of the East against the West was not pos- 
sible. But the Crusaders of 1204 had knocked to pieces the 
old Byzantine Empire, the former guardian of the gate 
against eastern adventurers, and had set up nothing to replace 
it. After 1291 there was no Christian military power left on 
guard towards the frontiers of Islam. The Frankish princi- 
palities of the nearer East — Cyprus, Athens, Achaia — were 
miserably weak. The restored Byzantine Empire of the 
wretched Paleologi was no stronger. The Knights Hospitallers 
of Rhodes were but a handful of adventurers isolated in a 
precarious outpost. There was nothing left to resist the 
Ottoman Turks of Asia Minor, who after small beginnings which 
date back to the thirteenth century, began to assail Christen- 
dom in the fourteenth, and crossed over into Europe — where 
their remnant still remains encamped — in 1354. By one of the 
unlucky coincidences of history the one power which seemed 
likely to replace Byzantium as the guardian of the Balkans 
— the Serbian empire of the great Czar Stephen Durhan, 
broke up on the death of that prince precisely at the moment 
of the Ottoman landing in the Gallipoli peninsula. 

Then came the nemesis of the commercial republics of 
Italy, for whose sole profit the Crusades seemed to have 



THE CRUSADES 135 

been fought out to an unsuccessful end. For, though the 
lands of the Levant had been lost, control over the sea and 
its trade was still retained by them after 1291. The fall 
of Acre had not ruined Venice or Genoa, who (accepting 
the situation) made financial compromises with the Mame- 
luke conqueror, and by commercial treaties, kept open the 
trade routes of the East (mainly now through Alexandria), 
for another two centuries and more, so long as the Mameluke 
dynasties endured. But when the Ottoman Turks, whose 
growing power and persistent hostility to Christendom the 
Italians deliberately ignored in their blind commercialism, 
finally built a navy, and captured the long-defended Con- 
stantinople in 1453, the face of the world was changed. Venice 
and Genoa had very deliberately refused to send any adequate 
help to save Constantinople — the Venetian fleet had actually 
run up to the Bosphorus, just before the siege, taken on 
board the greater part of the Venetian colony there, and gone 
off for good. 

The nemesis came in a few years. Mahomet II set himself 
to create a great naval power, and to cut off all the threads 
of Western commerce. Before he was dead he had effectually 
blocked the way to the Black Sea, and had practically mastered 
the iEgean. Christian vessels could get no further than 
Crete, Rhodes, and Cyprus. Venice fought hard now, when 
it was too late ; but her Golden Age was gone for good. Forty 
years later Selim the Terrible conquered Syria and Egypt, 
and blocked the sole surviving avenue of Western and Eastern 
trade, by destroying the Mameluke Sultanate, and capturing 
Alexandria in 1517. The Turk, in his day of triumph, was 
altogether fanatical, and anti-commercial ; he wished to have 
no dealings with the West save with the sword. That which 
followed — the great sixteenth-century assault of the Ottoman 
Empire on Central and Southern Europe, culminating at the 
siege of Vienna in 1529 — is another story, too long to be told 
in these few pages. I take the tale of East and West no 
further than the time when Venice and Genoa, stripped of their 
ancient sea-supremacy, no longer " holding the gorgeous 
East in fee," nor living the wealthy exuberant life that they 
had enjoyed for the last three centuries, at last paid the 



136 THE CRUSADES 

penalty of commercial ruin for their failure to back up the 
Christian powers of the East, and were left to moulder, 
" stranded shells of former greatness," by the Mediterranean 
shore. 

Who could have foreseen in 1291 or in 1453 or in 1517 
that the next conquest of Egypt and Syria from the West 
would be carried out by an invader as remote and improbable 
as — let us say — the Mongols were in 1098, when Frank and 
Turk and Saracen first contended for the guardianship of 
the Holy Places ? I do not, of course, allude to Bonaparte's 
fiasco of 1798-99, made with inadequate means and without a 
safe line of communication with his base. He merely pointed 
out the way, and demonstrated the weakness of the decaying 
Ottoman Empire. The reconquest of Palestine and Syria 
was to be accomplished by a British army. There was one 
well-known Englishman in the first Crusade — the worthy but 
unlucky Edgar Atheling. It would be interesting to know 
what he would have thought of the prophecy — if it had been 
made to him — that the armies of a descendant of his sister, 
Queen Margaret of Scotland, would one day, without any 
appreciable help from any other Christian power, sweep 
the Turk out of Syria in one majestic campaign. The enemy 
was still to be the Turk — if Ottoman and not Seljouk, yet 
still the same tough fighter in war, and hopeless maladminis- 
trator and waster of culture in time of peace. Palestine has 
not changed much since 1099 — the dry limestone uplands, the 
waterless ravines, the thin-spread population, the blazing 
sun of summer, the pestilent torrents of the short rainy season, 
were the same in 1918 as the Crusading chronicler describes 
them as being in his day. But how changed the character 
of the combatants — the Crusaders' complaint was always 
that he lacked light cavalry — we swamped Palestine with 
Australian mounted infantry and Indian lancers, and cut off 
and surrounded the last Turkish army by the most beautiful 
cavalry manoeuvre in recorded military history, which began 
with the " second battle of Arsouf " and ended in the capture 
of Damascus and Aleppo in an incredibly short term of days. 
In 1099 the Turk was essentially a fighter on horseback — a 
mounted archer : in 1918 he had become an obstinate sticker 



THE CRUSADES 137 

to trenches, with no adequate cavalry arm at all ! But I 
must not dwell on the last Eastward swing of the pendulum. 
The story of Allenby's Syrian campaign deserves something 
more than casual comment. 



VII 
LORD CARTERET 

A few years ago one of our popular historians gave fair 
expression to the feeling of the English reading public, when 
he labelled the political history of the period which lies between 
the death of Queen Anne and the Seven Years' War as " remark- 
able for its distressing commonness and flatness both in 
men and in affairs." Amid the obscurity of its first half 
nothing is visible but the burly figure of Walpole ; when 
the great minister has been displaced, it is only to usher in 
the tedious struggle of the Whig factions for office — the 
great battle of the kites and crows, whose details are inex- 
pressibly wearisome to every one save that strangely con- 
stituted being the professed parliamentary historian. Happily 
we have learnt of late that the history of England is something 
more than the history of parliaments and ministries and 
congresses, or we should be tempted to surrender the greater 
part of the reigns of the first two Georges to the annalist and 
the antiquary. 

John Lord Carteret was a statesman of brilliant parts, 
whose misfortune it was to live in that dullest of times. He 
was a young man just entering public life when Queen Anne 
died, and a gout-ridden invalid of sixty-six when Boscawen's 
cannon in the Gulf of St. Lawrence announced the rupture 
of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. This fact goes far towards 
explaining the oblivion into which a man of such mark has 
fallen, but other causes are not far to seek. 

Carteret's whole life was a brilliant failure : the best years 
of it were spent in futile opposition to Walpole ; and when 
at last he had succeeded in seizing the reins of power, he 
was ignominiously thwarted, and ere long overthrown, by 
his own disloyal colleagues. The policy which he strove to 
carry out was in its essence the same which afterwards brought 

138 



LORD CARTERET 139 

fame and popularity to the elder Pitt. But Carteret failed 
in his endeavour to apply it, and has been forgotten : Pitt, 
who obtained the free hand which the elder statesman could 
never gain, succeeded, and has won the credit of being the 
sole inventor and exponent of such views. Beside his practical 
achievements Carteret's ingenious but fruitless schemes are 
thrown completely into the shade. If the two men are ever 
mentioned together, it is only when historians detail the 
truculent abuse which Pitt in his free-lance days heaped 
upon the " desperate rhodomontading minister " who in 1744 
advocated the same foreign policy which was to be the glory 
of 1758. 

In an age of political pamphlets, memoirs, and diaries, 
Carteret steadfastly kept the printer idle. The numerous 
unpublished dispatches from his hand show that he possessed 
a clear and forcible style : the few private letters which have 
survived are sufficient — in spite of Lord Shelburne's verdict 
that Carteret " could never write a common letter well " 
— to prove that his reputation for incisive humour was not 
undeserved. Every contemporary writer agrees that he was 
a ripe scholar and a marvellous linguist, that he held his own 
with Swift in the contest of wits, and spent long evenings in 
thrashing out the metres of Terence with Bentley. He was 
reckoned by his friends the best, and by his enemies the 
second best, speaker in the House of Lords, and the few 
happy phrases of his oratory that have come down to us fully 
bear out their verdict. But all our admiration for him must 
be at second hand : it is from the impression that he left 
on others, not from that which we ourselves receive, that 
our notion of his character must be drawn. He has left 
no literary memorial of any kind whatsoever behind him. 
That his parliamentary speeches should have perished is 
nothing strange : they have but shared the fate of those of 
every other statesman of the days when reporting was a crime. 
But that a man of such pronounced literary tastes should 
never have written a line outside his necessary public and 
private correspondence is nothing less than astonishing. If 
he did not join Pulteney in penning political pamphlets, we 
might have expected to find him dabbling like Chesterfield 



140 LORD CARTERET 

in miscellaneous essay writing, or wooing the Muses in happier 
numbers than Pitt, or solacing the weariness of long years 
spent in Opposition by writing memoirs. Not a single work, 
however, issued from his hand. The curious inquirer who 
consults the headings " Carteret " or " Granville " in one 
of our great public libraries will find nothing under them 
but one wretched political squib dedicated to Carteret in 
1722 by an anonymous Whig pamphleteer. His own con- 
temporaries expected more of him : in 1737 it was noised 
abroad that he was writing a " History of his own time," 
and society speculated on the judgments he would pass 
on its more prominent members. There seems, however, 
to have been no truth in the report : if projected, the work 
was never begun. 

But in spite of his literary inactivity, and of the singular 
carelessness which he always displayed as to his own post- 
humous reputation, we should not have expected that his 
countrymen would " succeed in altogether forgetting their 
considerable Carteret," as Carlyle phrased it. He had always 
been a friend and patron of literary men, not merely of poets 
and scholars but of historians, such as Harte, the author 
of the Life of Gustavus Adolphus. Probably we may say 
of him, as of many another statesman, that he lived too long 
for his own reputation. Had he died in 1746, men would 
have said that the most striking personality in English politics 
had been removed : by 1763 his rise and fall, his talents and 
ambition, were already on the way to be forgotten. 

The verdicts of modern historians on him have been shallow 
and unjust. One writer speaks of him as " presenting a fearful 
example of a highly cultivated intellect and a great capacity 
for business totally ruined and obscured by the pernicious 
habit of drinking to which he was a slave," another as " a 
man of genius but of irregular life, capricious and sudden in 
all his actions." With the story of his career before us, 
we can see at a glance how futile are the cheap Tacitean 
paradoxes of the majority of our nineteenth-century writers, 
who seem to have taken the most fantastic statements of 
Hervey and Horace Walpole as sober and accurate narration 
of fact where Carteret was concerned. Even Mr. Lecky's 



LORD CARTERET 141 

judicious estimate of the man must be to a certain extent 
modified, much more so Macaulay's characteristic epigrams. 

As to the attractive side of Carteret's character we need 
only say that he had every faculty that could attract admira- 
tion and win the love of friends. There is no reason to requote 
the opinions which Macaulay collected, from Chatham and 
Chesterfield, Horace Walpole, Swift, and Johnson — all men 
with whom Carteret had come into hostile collision — as to 
his abilities as a statesman. Perhaps we may mention as a 
less hackneyed piece of evidence the remark of Speaker Onslow, 
another old enemy of Carteret's, that " it was not his aim 
to aggrandise himself : he was all for glory, even to the enthusi- 
asm of it, and that made him more scrupulous in the means 
he used for his greatness." 

That he was perfectly incorrupt in money matters, and 
was a heavy loser while he held office under the Crown, is 
acknowledged by all. But personal integrity of that kind 
can be ascribed to Bolingbroke, to Newcastle, even to Wal- 
pole himself. The virtue in which Carteret stands unrivalled 
is his utter detestation for the abuses of patronage. No 
unworthy relative or dependent ever owed a place to his recom- 
mendation : he drove off his nearest friends and most necessary 
political allies, when once they began to talk to him of posts 
and pensions. The well-known story told by Lord Chief 
Justice Willes is a sufficient illustration : — 

" Sir R. Walpole promised me to make my friend Clive one of the 
King's Counsel : but too late ! When Lord Granville [Carteret's later 
title] came to the height of his power, I one day said to him, ' My lord, 
you are going to the king ; do ask him to make poor Clive one of his 
Counsel.' He turned and replied, ' What is it to me who is a judge or a 
bishop ? It is my business to make kings and emperors, and to maintain 
the balance of Europe.' I replied, ' Then those who want to be bishops 
or judges will apply to those who will submit to make it their business.' " 

To turn to the other side, there is but one serious charge 
made against him — that he was addicted to port wine. We 
do not wish to give any exaggerated importance to the charge ; 
the modern historians who have pitched upon inebriety as 
the most prominent feature in Carteret's private character 
have gone ludicrously wrong. But it is impossible to ignore 



142 LORD CARTERET 

the consensus of opinion in contemporary writers. It is 
not enemies alone who say that Carteret loved his bottle 
too well ; his friends admit it — even his own son-in-law 
euphemistically calls him a hon-vivant. That the public 
voice named his tenure of office " the Drunken Administra- 
tion " may go for little ; but we cannot fail to see that many 
of the best of his sayings breathe a post-prandial atmosphere. 
Lord Shelburne himself prefaces one of them by the obser- 
vation that before a Cabinet Council his illustrious relative 
" had generally dined." It is equally impossible to mistake 
the tastes of the man who said that he liked to have Steele 
and Addison together for an evening, the one for the start, 
the other for the finish ; " for, by the time that Steele had 
drunk himself down, Addison had drunk himself up." We 
cannot misconceive the meaning of the fits of gout to which 
Carteret was a martyr in his later years ; there can be no 
doubt that, like many another statesman, he was suffering 
from the effects of the Methuen Treaty. There is no proof 
that drink ever obscured Carteret's intellect, or that he ever 
sank to making a public exhibition of its effects, as not only 
the younger Pitt but at least one more recent premier is accused 
of doing. But in a hard-drinking age he earned a special reputa- 
tion for loving his port overmuch, and we cannot ignore the 
consequences to his character, and to the estimation in which 
he was held. The charge, even when admitted, is not a very 
heavy one ; it leaves us perfectly free to hold that he was 
not merely magnanimous in his own large eighteenth-century 
way, but worthy of liking and esteem to a degree which none 
of his contemporaries, save Pitt alone, could attain. A 
statesman of that day against whom nothing can be brought 
but a too copious thirst and a few rather unworthy political 
intrigues, entered into in the heat of a ministerial crisis, may 
pass as a man of approved virtue. 

In a prolonged panegyric on Carteret we need not indulge : 
the strength and the weakness of that remarkable man are 
best realized by glancing at the strange vicissitudes of his 
career — a career whose early promise and performance were 
extraordinary ; whose middle part was blighted by long 
exclusion from office under the jealous rule of Walpole ; whose 



LORD CARTERET 143 

final act began with such brilliant success only to end tamely 
in defeat at the hands of the meanest and most contemptible 
of enemies. 

The Carterets are an ancient and honourable family in 
Jersey, but till Stuart times their reputation was bounded 
by the limits of that pleasant but not too spacious island. 
The one notable story in their earlier annals is a legend of 
the defeat of Du Guesclin by Reginald de Carteret and his 
eight sons, and of their consequent knighting by King Edward 
III ; but on this tale sceptics have cast their doubts. The 
real importance of the house dates only from Sir George 
Carteret, a zealous Royalist who held Jersey for Charles II 
down to the month of December, 1651, long after the " Crown- 
ing Mercy " had driven the last royal garrisons in Great Britain 
to despair and surrender. On his restoration Charles for once 
contrived to remember the services of a faithful adherent. 
Sir George received places and pensions, and when his heir 
was slain in early manhood at the battle of Solebay, the king 
endeavoured to recompense the loyalty of the family by grant- 
ing a peerage to the old man's grandson and namesake. This 
George, first Baron Carteret, was cut off like his father before 
he had time to make a name in the world. He died at the 
age of twenty-six, leaving two infant sons by his wife Lady 
Grace Granville, who was to survive him for a full half -century. 
She was a granddaughter of Sir Bevil Grenville, the hero 
of Stratton and Lansdowne fights. 

John, the famous statesman, was the elder of the sons of 
the first peer : he was five, and his brother Philip only three, 
when their father died in 1695. Both the boys were sent to 
Westminster School. Philip stayed there till the unusually 
late age of eighteen, was accidentally drowned in the Thames, 
and was mourned in excellent sapphics by his head master, 
Dr. Friend. John left the school at fifteen, but had already 
made a reputation as an unusually clever boy. He seems to 
have always retained a great affection for Westminster. 
The young peer was made a " Busby Trustee " before he came 
of age, and frequented the Plays and other festivities of St. 
Peter's School long after he had become a pillar of the State. 

Of Carteret's Oxford life some suggestive facts are to be found 



144 LORD CARTERET 

in Hearne's Diaries. He matriculated at Christ Church on 
January 15, 1706, being then somewhat under sixteen years 
of age, and had the privilege of paying £2, where his companions 
contributed 25. 6d., to the University Chest. He resided 
four years, but never chose to take his degree, 1 although 
it might have been obtained easily enough by the favour of 
the Chancellor, without the completion of the necessary 
exercises, as were those of most other noble graduates of 
that day. But Carteret never ceased to be an undergraduate 
till an honorary D.C.L. was conferred on him at the Encaenia 
of 1756. He studied Civil Law to such effect that, fifty years 
after he had left the university, he was able to use his knowledge 
in that branch of learning to confute Lord Chancellor Hard- 
wicke on his own ground. However, he did not design to 
make himself a mere Civilian : his studies ranged over the 
whole field of classical and modern literature. He was a con- 
stant reader in the Bodleian, and to that fact we owe our first 
description of him. Hearne, the famous Jacobite sub -librarian, 
notes him in 1709 as " juvenis ingenii acutissimi, morum 
suavissimorum, et in primae classis scriptoribus, cum Grsecis 
turn Latinis, supra annos versatus. In iEde Christi, studiis 
deditus, vitam agit." On one occasion he took Hearne to his 
rooms in Christ Church, and showed him with pride some early 
printed editions of Livy which he had collected. A little 
later we find him subscribing to Dr. Barnes's " Homer," a 
very characteristic touch, for the Iliad was always his favourite 
book, and he actually died with Sarpedon's speech to Glaucus 
upon his lips. The world in after years accused him of having 
learnt his drinking habits at the university, and it is curious 
to find that on one occasion Hearne had been holding a sit- 
ting with " that great proficient in Greek and all polite learn- 
ing, my Lord Carteret of Ch. Ch.," whereat they drank Dr. and 
Mrs. Barnes's healths two or three times over each, not without 
other libations, we may presume. 



1 By a ridiculous blunder biographical dictionaries invariably state 
that Carteret was made an honorary D.C.L. on April 26, 1706, three 
months after his matriculation. He has been confounded with his 
uncle John Lord Granville. 



LORD CARTERET 145 

All this sounds like the beginnings of the life of a mere student 
and bibliophile, but in 1710 Carteret broke with Oxford and 
her placid delights. He came up to London, and within a 
few months had married Frances Worsley, daughter of Sir 
Robert Worsley. The united age of bride and bridegroom 
did not quite reach thirty-seven, and the courtship was short 
and sudden : but all accounts agree that the marriage was 
a most happy one. In that dissolute age Carteret was con- 
spicuous for his conjugal fidelity, and not even the most 
scandalous of his enemies ever reflected on his morals. 

A few months after his marriage Carteret came of age and 
took his seat in the House of Lords. He does not seem at 
first to have definitely attached himself to either of the great 
parties. The Tories were at that moment in the ascendant, 
and as his father had been a Tory and his uncle was at this 
very time Secretary at War in Harley's government, it might 
have been expected that he himself would incline to that 
side. Indeed, the fact that he had at Oxford been intimate 
with Hearne, a man to whom all Whigs were as poison, would 
lead us to think that his Whig proclivities must have been 
very slight. Of the first four years of his parliamentary 
career, we can only discover that as late as the winter of 1713-14 
Peter Wentworth (perhaps the most intrepid speller of our 
Augustan age) calls " Lord Carterwright " a " straggling peer " 
who returned sometimes to vote with the Court party. 1 
We cannot say that Carteret definitely declared for the Whigs 
by voting against the ministerial resolution that " the Pro- 
testant Succession was in no danger " ; several undoubted 
Tories, such as the Earls of Abingdon, Jersey, and Anglesey, 
joined him in so doing. A better test of his conversion to 
Whig principles is the fact that in the May of the same year 
he voted against the Schism Act, which was supported by 
Anglesey and the other " Hanoverian Tory " peers. From 
that moment his politics were never doubtful. 

Three months after the Schism Act had passed Queen 

1 Wentworth Papers, p. 367. Wentworth's spelling is wild beyond 
conception. He calls Walpole " Wallpoole," and Kensington " Kin- 
senton," habitually. 

U.C.D. L 



146 LORD CARTERET 

Anne died, and the Whig Party entered on that long tenure 
of office which was to endure for all but a complete half- 
century. Carteret had, as it turned out, chosen his side 
wisely. Before the new king was crowned he was appointed 
a Lord of the Bedchamber, and a few months later he was 
made Lord-Lieutenant of Devonshire, though his property 
and influence did not lie in that county. Probably Whig 
magnates were rare in the Jacobite West, and a man of ability 
was required to manage a shire where a French landing was 
always possible. While the rebellion of 1715 was in pro- 
gress Carteret was vigilantly moving about, " improving the 
thoughts of the neighbouring gentry, and discountenancing 
the seeds of faction that have been sown in these parts," 
as he phrased it himself. But his powers were not destined 
to be tried by any outbreak. Devonshire made no move- 
ment, and the months of danger passed safely by. 

We have now reached the point at which Carteret became 
a notable figure in politics. When once he has taken office 
and his public correspondence becomes available, the meagre 
and fragmentary record of his career grows fuller and clearer. 
Up to this moment there was no tangible proof of Carteret's 
abilities. Evidently his contemporaries believed in him, but 
their belief had not as yet been justified by any notable achieve- 
ment. There was no doubt that he was a good Whig, that 
he possessed a pretty wit, and that, though somewhat of 
a scholar and a student, he had a considerable political ambi- 
tion. But many a young man starts in life with all these 
attributes and never makes his mark. Carteret was now about 
to be tested by the logic of facts, and to show that his friends' 
confidence was not misplaced. 

On the hopelessly dull and uninteresting details of the quarrel 
between the Whigs who followed Walpole, and the Whigs 
who followed Sunderland or Stanhope in the earlier years 
of George I, there is no reason to enlarge. Suffice it to say 
that Carteret cast in his lot with Sunderland, and by so doing 
determined the whole of his own career, for he ihereby earned 
Walpole's undying enmity, and that enmity was to keep him 
but of office for the best years of his life. A happy turn 
for the easy acquisition of languages, a good address, and 



LORD CARTERET 147 

a talent for picking up miscellaneous information, marked 
Carteret out as a possible diplomatist. Sunderland deter- 
mined to make trial of him in a position of considerable import- 
ance, and sent him out as Ambassador Extraordinary to 
Sweden. 

His Swedish dispatches are most interesting, and a perusal 
of them is enough by itself to give a fair idea of Carteret's 
character. We are struck at once with the happy combina- 
tion of foresight and of capacity for sudden action, of readi- 
ness and of persistence, which they display, above all with 
their sustained hopefulness and buoyancy of spirit in the midst 
of countless checks and hindrances. 

Six months before Carteret landed at Gothenborg a traitorous 
pistol-shot from the rear had laid Charles XII dead in the 
trenches of Fredrikshald on November 30, 1718. His sister 
Ulrika Eleonora succeeded to a disputed crown, an empty 
exchequer, a factious Diet, and four foreign wars. Seldom 
has a country reached a more forlorn condition than Sweden 
at that moment : the empire which Gustavus Adolphus had 
built up was crumbling to pieces from sheer want of men and 
money to maintain a war with all its neighbours at once. The 
Danes were invading the western provinces from their base 
in Norway, the Russian fleet was harrying the shores of Upland 
and Sudermania, the King of Prussia had just conquered 
Pomerania and Riigen ; lastly, George of England, intent 
on revenge for Charles XII's support of the Pretender, and 
seeing a fair chance of adding to his beloved electoral territories, 
had stretched out his hand for the duchies of Bremen and 
Verden. The interests which Carteret — starting at the 
age of twenty-eight on his first diplomatic campaign — had 
to reconcile seemed hopelessly at variance. England did 
not wish to see Sweden too much weakened, yet the King 
of England was bent on gaining land from her for his own 
private domain. Russia, Prussia, and Denmark were resolved 
to get all that they could extort from their exhausted enemy, 
while the unruly Swedish Diet refused to hear reason till 
the conqueror was at their very gates. " They do not as 
yet feel all their wounds," wrote Carteret ; " they are still 
warm. The late king put a spirit and a courage and left 



148 LORD CARTERET 

a motion in this nation which is not yet expired, though 
it abates daily and must soon cease." 

The reconciliation of all parties concerned and the happy 
conclusion of four several peaces were probably the cleverest 
achievement of the whole of Carteret's career. He persuaded 
the Swedish Government to begin by buying off the enmity 
of his own master with the required territorial cessions, on 
condition that England should grant her friendly mediation 
with the other powers. Then, bringing up the British fleet 
into the Baltic, he overawed the Russian and the Dane into 
withdrawal. This was the boldest of strokes, for he had 
neither permission nor intention to use the fleet for actual 
warlike operations, and could only reckon on the moral effect 
of its presence. But he had gauged the situation, and believed 
that a mere demonstration would be enough. Nor was 
he disappointed. The appearance of Admiral Norris and 
his seventy-fours was the signal for the disappearance of 
Tsar Peter and his marauding squadron. The Danes con- 
sented to an armistice, the King of Prussia proved open 
to negotiations, and signs of peace began to appear on the 
horizon. 

" I don't care for bold strokes," wrote Carteret, " but I have lived by 
nothing else since I came here. . . . No public minister was ever for 
a month together upon so bad or so dangerous a situation as I have 
been. The common people looked upon me as the author of their 
misery while no succour came. . . . However, I still went on in the 
same strain, and have worked through with success, so that at present 
no ambassador was ever upon a better footing in a country than I am." 

Ere long Frederick William came to terms, obtaining the 
cession of Stettin and its district on the payment of two 
million florins. A curious instance of the king's economy 
came out in the course of the negotiation. He stipulated 
that the wagons and horses which brought the Prussian money 
should be precisely paid for. " So minute a particular," 
wrote Carteret, " has hardly ever been inserted before in a 
treaty to be made between two crowns." 

When Denmark also had been satisfied by a comparatively 
small cession of territory and a sum of 600,000 dollars, Car- 
teret's popularity rose to its zenith. The Queen of Sweden 



LORD CARTERET 149 

loaded him with praises, the ministers were constant in their 
attendance on him, the Diet expressed its thanks. When he 
visited Copenhagen he was much surprised to find that in 
Denmark also he was regarded with high approval, as the 
terminator of the war. Frederick IV on receiving him 
commenced with the happy speech : " Milord, comme par 
votre entremise j'ai fait la paix, et qu'a cette heure mes armes 
me sont inutiles, permettez-moi que je vous fasse present de 
mon epee," handing him at the same time a sword valued 
at 20,000 crowns, specially made for the occasion. 

After Carteret had quitted the north, but entirely in con- 
sequence of the success of his previous negotiations, the Tsar 
was induced to make the peace of Nystadt, which restored 
Finland to Sweden, though it stripped her of her possessions 
to the south and south-east of the gulf of the same name. 
Thus the work of pacification was completed. 

The bold and skilful diplomacy which had given peace to 
Europe was less appreciated in England than in any other 
country. The Government, indeed, was satisfied, but it is 
doubtful whether the general public had any conception of 
the matter, beyond the notion that Carteret had used the 
power of England in order to enable King George to add a 
strip of Swedish territory to his hated electorate. On the 
man himself the effect was most marked : it gave him a jovial 
self-reliance and a cheerful confidence in his own " bold 
strokes " which were for the future the most prominent 
features in his character. He had picked up a knowledge 
not only of Swedish but of German during his eighteen months 
of sojourn at Stockholm, and had thoroughly mastered the 
politics of all the northern powers. Consequently it was 
not unnatural that he should believe that the foreign rela- 
tions of his country were by far the most important things 
with which the ministry was charged, and that he should be 
profoundly convinced that skilful diplomacy could accomplish 
all things — even the impossible. It can easily be guessed how 
these ideas clashed with the theories of Walpole, with whom 
he was soon to be brought into the closest contact. The two 
men and their notions of England's true policy were abso- 
lutely and entirely incompatible. 



150 LORD CARTERET 

During the last months of Carteret's stay in Sweden the 
great South Sea crash had occurred. He arrived in England 
just in time to find his patron Sunderland tottering to his 
fall, and Walpole preparing to resume his place in the ministry. 
When the new government was formed, the last trace of 
the outgoing premier's influence was the appointment of 
Carteret as " Secretary of State for the Southern Depart- 
ment." This gave him the control of our foreign relations 
with France, Spain, Italy, and Turkey. The " Secretary 
for the North," who had charge of Scandinavia, Russia, and 
Germany, was his future bane, the Duke of Newcastle. Car- 
teret held this post for exactly three years, with very con- 
siderable credit to his own powers as an administrator and 
diplomatist, but with gradually decreasing influence in the 
ministry. The truth was that Walpole had made up his 
mind to get rid of him by fair means or foul. He disliked 
him as an unwelcome legacy from Sunderland, but he abso- 
lutely dreaded him as a possible rival in the favour of the 
king ; we may add that on grounds of general principle he 
objected to having any man of more than average ability 
serving under him in the Cabinet. George I, as every one 
knows, was fond of interfering in every branch of European 
politics. Walpole, to whom all foreign languages were as 
sealed books, was almost incredibly ignorant of the common- 
places of diplomacy. He lived, therefore, in a constant state 
of nightmare, picturing to himself Carteret obtaining the 
king's full confidence by conversing with him in the mysterious 
German tongue on the affairs of the Continent. Nor was 
he entirely in the wrong : George certainly displayed some 
partiality for the young Secretary of State, and even took 
him over to enjoy the delights of Hanover. This brought 
matters to a crisis ; for six months there was open war, and 
then the king was induced to dismiss Carteret from his post. 
During the period of stress the falling minister was endeavour- 
ing to save himself by his personal credit with the king and 
his entourage. He won the favour of the Duchess of Kendal 
by undertaking to settle certain private matters about which 
she was treating with Cardinal Dubois, and afterwards with 
Orleans' favourite Noce. By this backstairs influence he 



LORD CARTERET 151 

was for a moment maintained ; but when Walpole had set his 
mind on a thing, the power of the king or the king's mistress 
was a broken reed on which to rely. In March, 1724, Carteret 
lost his secretaryship, and his fall was hardly softened by 
the fact that he was in the next month presented with the 
extremely undesirable post of Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, 
more to keep him out of London than to solace him for his 
removal from the Cabinet. Indeed there were many who 
thought that Walpole sent him over the Channel merely 
that he might wreck his career in that unhappy island, the 
grave of great reputations. 

With Carteret's removal to Ireland his public correspond- 
ence almost entirely fails us, and becomes incomplete and 
fragmentary. The controversy about Wood's halfpence was 
assuming dangerous proportions at the moment of his appoint- 
ment, and it was probably Walpole's plan to make him the 
scapegoat in the matter, if any such were required. Swift 
and the new Lord-Lieutenant had been slightly acquainted 
before, and had no unkindly recollection of each other. But 
any less adroit and genial personage than Carteret must have 
found himself committed to war with the fiery Dean before 
a month was over. The sound and fury of the Drapier's 
Letters are now forgotten, but the ruler who dealt with them 
without losing his head must have been a man of imperturbable 
temper. Though not personally attacked, he could not but 
resent the barefaced sedition which, in his own words, " struck 
at the dependency of Ireland on the throne of Great Britain." 
Nevertheless, he succeeded in keeping off any actual collision. 
One good story is told of the curious relations between Swift 
and Carteret, at the time when a proclamation was out against 
the more than suspected author of the Drapier's Letters, and 
yet the two men were continually meeting on friendly terms 
in private life. The Dean, making a call at the Castle, was 
kept some time waiting in the anteroom, for the Lord-Lieu- 
tenant was engaged. Growing impatient he sent in a card 
with two lines scribbled on it : — 



My very good Lord, 'tis a very hard task 

For a man to wait here who has nothing to ask." 



152 LORD CARTERET 

Carteret sent out an answer at once in the happy lines : — 

" My very good Dean, there are few who come here 
But have something to ask, or something to fear." 

When Wood's execrated patent was finally withdrawn, the 
discredit of the defeat did not fall on the Lord-Lieutenant. 
He had so carefully confined himself to a cautious and wary 
carrying out of orders expressly given in England, that no 
one could say that he was personally compromised in the 
smallest degree. 

Of the last five years of Carteret's stay in Ireland there is 
not very much to tell. Swift wrote that " I confess that he 
had a genteeler manner of binding the chains of this kingdom 
than most of his predecessors." Nobody who has read Mr. 
Lecky's chapters on Ireland in his Eighteenth Century can fail 
to catch the allusion. Though personally mild and genial, 
Carteret was charged with the carrying out of a most detest- 
able policy. During his tenure of office the exclusion of all 
Irishmen from promotion became more marked than ever. 
The times were bad, trade continually decreased, yet Walpole 
was always loading the Irish pension-list with all the jobs 
that were too flagrant to be carried out in England. The 
Lord-Lieutenancy must have been no pleasant post for a 
man who, whatever his faults, had a good heart and an unfeigned 
dislike to the evils of misused patronage. 

In 1730 Carteret returned from his exile, and, resuming 
the place in the House of Lords from which he had so long 
been absent, plunged at once into vehement opposition to 
Walpole's government. For twelve weary years that opposition 
continued, and it was not till nine of those twelve had elapsed 
that ultimate success appeared in the least probable. We 
may fairly say that Carteret wasted on fruitless parliamentary 
wrangling, and still more fruitless attempts to win the favour 
of the king and queen, those years of his life when brain and 
nerves were at their best and strongest. His administrative 
talents found no better scope than the endeavour to organize 
a party which always turned out to be in the minority. His 
skilful diplomacy had to be exercised in futile attempts to 
gain personal interviews with the queen, or even with those 



LORD CARTERET 153 

who were about the queen's person. He leagued himself 
with Pulteney and Chesterfield, and Argyll, but neither the 
racy political writing of the first, nor the sonorous eloquence 
of the second, nor the parliamentary influence of the third 
availed him aught against Walpole's skilfully managed money- 
bags. He turned to the Tories : he stimulated the vehemence 
of Pitt and Lyttelton and the other " Boy-patriots," but his 
heterogeneous forces were only mustered in order to suffer 
defeat. The man who at twenty-eight had settled the affairs 
of Europe was apparently a stranded wreck at fifty. 

Constant failure is said to leave men either soured or indif- 
ferent. Carteret had too buoyant a spirit to sink into gloom 
and despair ; nor did his twelve years' apprenticeship to 
adversity cause him to quit political life. After leading a 
furious assault on Walpole and suffering the usual defeat he 
would retire in complete good humour to his books and his 
bottle and wait for the chance of another fight. But there 
can be little doubt that his long exclusion from office injured 
his character by sapping his sense of responsibility. There 
were not unfrequent occasions when his conduct sank into 
mere factiousness, and this was remembered against him 
when he himself came at last into power. It is easy to under- 
stand the irritation of the knot of men of genius whose careers 
were spoilt merely because Walpole could not tolerate ability 
in his subordinates. But the penalty which they had to 
pay for their unceasing onslaughts on the great minister was 
to acquire a reputation for levity, and for loving opposition 
for opposition's sake. 

On the question of the Spanish war, however, we are not 
disposed to join the common cry . of those who denounce 
Carteret and Pulteney for having driven Walpole into an 
unjust and unnecessary conflict with an unoffending neighbour. 
All such accusations are out of place since the long-hidden 
terms of the first " Family Compact " of 1733 can be studied 
by the historian. Whether Robert Jenkins, whose name 
has been so ridiculously imposed on the war, ever lost his 
ear or not makes no difference to us. We know that the 
house of Bourbon had bound itself in close alliance to impose 
its will on Europe. We know that England was expressly 



154 LORD CARTERET 

named as a possible enemy, and that Spain undertook, long 
before any offence had been given, and while the most pacific 
of English ministers was in office, to endeavour to ruin England's 
trade. The molestation which our merchants suffered on 
the Spanish Main and in the South Seas was part of a deliber- 
ate plan to transfer our commercial advantages to France. 
Not merely, then, in the interest of the balance of power 
in Europe, threatened by the preponderance of the Bourbons, 
but in the defence of our own rights, we were perfectly justified 
in taking up the sword. Carteret, more versed in foreign 
politics than any other Englishman of his day, thoroughly 
understood the state of affairs, and very rightly decided in 
favour of war. 

Driven to fight against his will, and fighting with an equal 
want of skill and of luck, Walpole at last lost his hold on 
the House of Commons. Defeated on January 28, 1742, on 
the paltry question of the Chippenham election petition, 
the great minister resigned. At last the conjuncture for 
which twenty able men had been scheming and working for 
the last dozen years had come to pass. The victory was 
won ; it only remained to be seen who would carry off 
the spoils. 

Pulteney was the first to whom the opportunity was offered ; 
but, with a sudden and incomprehensible fear of the situation 
which he had so long been scheming to bring about, that 
statesman refused to accept office. Carteret was the next 
whose name was suggested to the King, and he proved more 
amenable than might have been expected to the royal behest. 
There were two courses open to him. He might stipulate 
for the entire exclusion of Walpole's party from the new 
Cabinet, and build it up by employing all the sections of 
the motley majority which had won the victory of January 
28, combining the Hanoverian Tories with the various sections 
of discontented Whigs. Or he might, with his own immediate 
following, join the more moderate members of the late ministry, 
and get the benefit of their enormous parliamentary influence. 
The former course was the more honest and the more difficult : 
to endeavour to combine Chesterfield and Argyll, Pitt and 
Cotton, would be undoubtedly hard. The second was the 



LORD CARTERET 155 

easier, but the less honourable : the men who had been denoun- 
cing Walpole's policy had no right to ally themselves with 
Walpole's lieutenants. In an evil hour, however, Carteret 
chose the worse alternative : he joined the new ministry in 
which Newcastle, Henry Pelham, Hardwicke, Wilmington, 
and Harrington, all of whom had served under Walpole, 
were allowed to find places. Wilmington was even given 
the nominal position of prime minister, though every one 
understood that he was and would be a mere cipher. On the 
other hand, Chesterfield, the "Patriots," and the Tories were 
excluded. 

This was the worst day's work that Carteret ever did for 
himself : he made the treacherous Pelhams his colleagues, 
and sent Pitt and Chesterfield into opposition. Within two 
years the Pelhams had intrigued him out of office, and the 
opposition had made him the best-hated man in England by 
their incendiary harangues. But it would be wrong to see 
in the causes of his fall nothing but the intrigues of New- 
castle and the harangues of Pitt. There can be no doubt, 
that the foibles of Carteret had quite as much to do with 
his disgrace as the machinations of his enemies. He was 
by nature and training better fitted for a diplomatist than a 
responsible minister. He hated the drudgery of parlia- 
mentary management, and despised the corrupt means which 
it then required. His mind was so set on carrying out his 
broad schemes of foreign policy that he could find no time to 
explain and justify them before Parliament and public opinion. 
Moreover, as Onslow observed, " he was all for glory." Car- 
teret, indeed, had no vulgar ambition ; we should be wrong 
if we classed him with the Newcastles or Henry Foxes of the 
day, as a man who engaged in politics from selfish love of 
power or desire for mere advancement. His ideal was, to 
use his own words — flippant in expression but sincere in thought 
— " to knock the heads of all the kings of Europe together, 
and jumble something out of it that may be of service to 
England." But in addition there can be no doubt that 
he took a keen personal pleasure in his diplomatic schemes. 
He loved to score a political success, but if success was impos- 
sible it gave him almost as much pleasure to fail after a well- 



156 LORD CARTERET 

fought struggle. The stir and bustle of the statesman's 
life, the skilful fencing of diplomatic interviews, the handling 
of the threads of national policy which ramified to every 
court in Europe, were very dear to him. He had one of 
those buoyant spirits on which responsibility sits lightly ; 
his cheerful and easy self-confidence saw its way through 
every difficulty, and his ready wit had an answer for every 
objection. Newcastle, finding a happy phrase for once in 
his life, said that " Carteret was one of the men who never 
doubted." The saying was true enough : his judgment 
was so quick, and his knowledge in every branch of practical 
affairs so wide, that he never had to stop to ponder long over 
a fine of action. One course always presented itself to his 
mind as obvious, the rest were dismissed without a further 
thought. 

In practical politics this faculty of rapid decision was by 
no means an unmixed advantage to Carteret. So clear was 
his mental vision that he was impatient with those whose 
perception was slow, and hardly condescended to explain 
his ideas to their duller intelligence. To mediocrities who 
could just see far enough to realize the difficulties of a ques- 
tion, the imperious decisiveness of his answers seemed to 
spring from mere unreflecting rashness. The favourite name 
for him in Opposition pamphlets was " Jack Headlong." 
His dislike to plunge into wearisome explanations and dis- 
cussion was most of all displayed when continental affairs 
were in question. Here he claimed a free hand ; when he 
had accompanied the King to Germany, he proceeded to 
enter into treaties and agreements to right and left, with- 
out giving any notice to his colleagues at home until the 
matters were settled. We can now see that his schemes 
were feasible, and his general plan of operations favourable 
to England. But while he was in fact walking at his ease 
through the labyrinthine mazes of German politics, those 
who had not the clue saw in him a blind leader of the blind, 
staggering at haphazard among snares and pitfalls, and drag- 
ging the nation to destruction after him. Unable to penetrate 
his designs, owing to the gross ignorance of continental affairs 
which reigned in England, they professed to come to one 



LORD CARTERET 157 

of three conclusions : either he was " mad," or he was " drunk," 
or he was betraying the interests of his country to the Hano- 
verian partialities of the king. 

Seldom have more unjust charges been brought against a 
statesman. His " madness " was precisely what was after- 
wards regarded as Pitt's inspiration — the idea that the power 
of the House of Bourbon might be bled to death in Germany. 
While his colleagues and rivals were thinking of petty expedi- 
tions against Dunkirk or Cartagena, Carteret had realized 
that such pin-pricks could have no effect on the general course 
of the war. He wished to wear down the enemy by confederate 
armies on the Scheldt, the Rhine, and the Alps, and trusted 
that England would open her purse to subsidize them. But 
men who had not a tithe of his knowledge of the Continent 
thought otherwise ; they found his scheme visionary and 
presumptuous, because the proof of its feasibility rested on 
data which were unknown to them. So his colleagues deserted 
him, while his enemies laid every folly and baseness to his 
charge. Pitt, unconscious of his own future, denounced 
" the execrable minister who seemed to have drunk of the 
potion which poets have described as causing men to forget 
then country." Chesterfield described him as one whose 
only object in life was to pour English guineas into the hands 
of foreigners, in order that the king might win some petty 
Hanoverian object. 

English public opinion seems to have realized very little 
of Carteret's scheme for a simultaneous attack on France 
by all the Powers of Central Europe. When it was reported 
that at a public banquet he had drunk to the " Restoration 
of Alsace and Lorraine to the Empire," the news went round 
that the English subsidies were to be spent in helping Austria 
to carry on a war of mere ambition and aggression. No one 
would see that every army that France had to put in motion 
for the East meant the diversion of a considerable portion of 
her resources from the defence of her naval power and colonies. 
The true and happy phrase that " Canada must be conquered 
on the plains of Germany " had not yet been invented ; the 
man who was one day to formulate it was at that moment 
thundering on Carteret's devoted head for daring to sub- 



158 LORD CARTERET 

sidize the few thousand Hanoverian troops who had joined 
the British army on the Main. 

This fatal Hanoverian question, the one point in foreign 
politics which every Englishman thought that he understood, 
was to be Carteret's ruin. It does not seem to have been in 
the least true that he played into the king's hands. If we 
had to hire auxiliaries, the battalions of the Electorate could 
be trusted far more than those of any other power. The 
stories of their cowardice and indiscipline which Pitt and 
Chesterfield spread abroad were malevolent inventions, 
destitute of any real foundation. Whenever Hanoverian 
troops served alongside of British, from Fontenoy to Welling- 
ton's Peninsular battles, they always did well. But it was 
safe to abuse Hanover : and by dint of repeated assertions that 
Carteret had sold his country, the opposition persuaded public 
opinion that there was something in the charge. 

Then came the chance of the Pelhams. They wanted to 
get rid of their headstrong colleague, who sent them from 
the heart of Germany imperious dispatches whose meaning 
they were unable to fathom, and left them the duty of wring- 
ing money for his subsidies out of a recalcitrant Parliament. 
Newcastle did not understand foreign politics, but he did 
understand the way to manage the baser part of the two 
Houses. By November, 1744, he and his brother had their 
plans ready. On the first day of the month the Duke handed 
to King George a memorial signed not only by the majority 
of the ministry, but by the whole of the Whig opposition, 
which denounced Carteret, his conduct, and his policy. The 
King was unwilling to lose a minister whose knowledge of 
German affairs had been so useful, and whose views tallied 
to a large extent with his own ; but he was not the fanatical 
admirer of his Secretary of State which men had supposed 
him to be. By the 24th he had discovered that any ministry 
of which Carteret formed a part would be in a hopeless minority 
in both Houses of Parliament, and on that day he yielded 
to the Pelhams. 

Nearly twenty years of life were before the fallen minister, 
who had now reached the age of fifty-four. But they were 
never to see him again at the head of affairs. For one moment 



LORD CARTERET 159 

in the winter of 1745—6, while the Jacobite rebellion was 
in full vigour, it seemed that he might be called back to power. 
But Pulteney, on whose aid he had been relying, deserted 
him in the moment of trial. That " Weathercock " — as 
Shelburne remarked — "always spoilt everything." The Pel- 
ham influence proved too strong, even at the moment when 
Newcastle and his brother had mismanaged affairs, both at 
home and abroad, to an extent which made Walpole's failures 
of 1739—42 look like brilliant successes. After being Secretary 
of State for precisely four days, Carteret — now become Earl 
Granville by the death of his aged mother — had to give place 
to his old enemies. He relapsed into opposition with his 
customary good humour, and employed himself in the study 
of his favourite Greek authors and the nursing of the gout 
which was fast growing upon him. 

By 1752 the last incident of his chequered career took 
place. The wheel of fortune brought round his turn when 
it was too late : he was now not much better than an invalid, 
though his mind and brain were clear enough. In that year 
the men who had turned him out of office so meanly came 
to him to invite him once more to join them. To every 
one's surprise he consented : non eadem est cetas, non mens, 
was the observer's comment, but this did not cover the whole 
truth. Carteret had been from the first wholly destitute of 
resentment, even to the verge of faultiness. It was not so 
much the active faculty of pardoning his enemies which he 
possessed, as the negative quality of being unable to hate 
them when they wronged him, the defect that Aristotle once 
called dogyrjaia. When they looked to see him angry and 
depressed, they found him regarding events with the eyes of 
a disinterested spectator of a humorous cast of mind. 

" Once, when terribly abused by Lord Aylesford in the House of 
Peers, he waited till the oration was over, and then, turning to those 
who were sitting by him, said with a cheerful unconcern, not at all 
affected or put on, but quite natural, ' Poor Aylesford is really angry ! ' " 

Now the English public likes a good hater. It has its 
doubts about the sincerity of a statesman who contents 
himself with showing that his opponents are illogical or ill- 
informed, and prefers to hear him charge them with wilful 



160 LORD CARTERET 

misdoing. Nothing is easier than to accuse Carteret of levity 
and want of principle for taking office in 1752. But it is 
rather to his conviction that he could be of service to England 
that his conduct must be referred. 

Seldom had one statesman played off on another meaner 
tricks than Newcastle and Pelham had used against Carteret. 
But in the day of their humiliation he consented to serve 
with them, in order that his knowledge of foreign affairs 
might be useful to the country. At the first Cabinet Council 
which he attended, he came cheerfully among his old detractors 
with the remark, " Well, my lords, here is the common enemy 
returned." For twelve years — till his death in 1763 — he 
was uninterruptedly Lord President of the Council. It is 
satisfactory to know that he was ere long reconciled to Pitt, 
who, recanting all his previous abuse, became his friend, and 
carried out the policy which its original inventor was now too 
old and broken to execute. " In the upper departments 
of government Carteret had no equal," said Pitt ; " to his 
instruction I owe whatever I am." It must have solaced 
the old minister in the long years when, " bent almost double, 
worn to a skeleton, and with the use of his legs quite gone," 
he still followed the course of affairs with an eager eye, to watch 
the working out of his own schemes in the Seven Years' 
War. He lived to see the Peace of Paris signed, and declared 
it just and reasonable. The last scene of his life is described 
in Wood's Essay on the Genius of Homer. 

" I found him," says Wood, " so languid that I proposed postponing 
my business (the reading over to him of the preliminary articles of the 
Peace of Paris) for another time. But he insisted that I should stay, 
saying it could not prolong his life to neglect his duty, and repeating 
the following passage out of Sarpedon's speech, he dwelled with par- 
ticular emphasis on the third line, which recalled to his mind the 
distinguished part he had taken in public affairs : — 

T Q nsnov, el /iiv yag noke/xov neql rovde cpvydvxeg 
alel dr] ixeXXoijxev ayrJQeo t° adavdrco re 
eoaeoB' , ovre xev avrog ivl nowroiot juaxoijjtrjv 
ovre %e ae oreXXoipn p,dyr\v eg xvdidveioav : 
vvv 6' [efxnrjg ydg xfjgeg eyeoraoiv Bavdroio 
fivglau, ag ovx eon cpvyelv figorov ovd' vndXvt-ai) 
hfj,ev. 



LORD CARTERET 161 

His lordship repeated the last word several times with a calm and 
determined resignation ; and after a serious pause of some minutes, he 
desired to hear the treaty read, to which he listened with great atten- 
tion, and recovered spirits enough to declare the approbation of a dying 
statesman (I use his own words) ' on the most glorious war and the 
most honourable peace this nation ever saw.' " 

Two days later the old man was dead. 



U.C.D. M 



VIII 

ON THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 
A.D. 1919-21 

Since modern history began there has never been a year 
in which the boundaries of Europe were altered in such a 
drastic fashion as in the twelvemonth of 1919-20, when the 
series of treaties which were negotiated at Versailles broke 
up the work of three centuries of diplomacy. The changes 
made at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 used to be con- 
sidered as broad and sweeping ; very important modifications 
were made at Aix-la-Chapelle, and at Utrecht, and at the 
Westphalian Conferences which ended the Thirty Years' 
War. But these may all be reckoned trifling compared 
with the astounding work of 1919-20, when the whole of 
Central and Eastern Europe seemed to be thrown on the 
table, like a child's puzzle-map, to be reconstructed with 
new and unfamiliar combinations of shapes and colours by 
unpractised hands. And this was accompanied not only 
by countless changes of proprietorship in the whole non- 
European part of the Western Hemisphere, but by alterations 
in the balance of world power, whose consequences we are 
but beginning to understand. Nor is this all — there were 
changes in the moral outlook of mankind, changes in social 
economy, changes in conception of law and international 
obligation. The brain reels when it tries to visualize as a 
whole the consequences of the Great War of 1914-18. Whole 
volumes have already been written on single aspects of the 
new situation. But it is with only one problem that I am 
endeavouring to deal. What are the lines on which the 
boundaries of states should be drawn ? — for all will acknow- 
ledge that there are right and wrong ways of drawing them. 

It was my duty in 1918-19 to be very busy with the old 
historical frontiers and political maps of the eighteenth and 

162 



THE DRAWING OP BOUNDARIES 163 

nineteenth centuries, on which reports and comments had 
to be drawn up. Hence came the impulse, perhaps a rather 
presumptuous one, to set forth some general deductions on 
topics which were puzzling the keenest brains of Europe 
and America. Let us at any rate see what were the methods 
of the past, and endeavour to learn from them something 
that may be of use in dealing with the problems of the future. 

What were the guiding principles of the statesmen of the 
Elder Europe, when they stood at the end of a victorious 
war, with the map laid out before them ? I think that we 
may discern four separate lines of thought, on each of which 
there is much to say. 

The first is mere " annexationism," land-hunger gratifying 
itself by the simple impulse of taking all that can be safely 
taken, as the victor's right. The second is the principle of 
" compensations," so dear to the diplomatists of the eighteenth 
century, which amounted to the general rule that if one state 
had received an increase of territory, or other advantages, 
its neighbours — or at least its allies — were entitled to similar 
augmentation. The third theory was that of " natural 
frontiers," which started on the plausible assertion that 
state boundaries ought to follow marked lines of geographical 
demarcation. The fourth — which often in practice got mixed 
with the third — was the doctrine of " necessary strategic 
frontiers," under which the victor pleads that, for his future 
safety against the possible revenge of the vanquished, he 
must take over fortresses, ports or strips of territory, to 
which he has no other claim, moral, geographical, or ethno- 
logical. This often becomes in practical application as shame- 
less as the first impulse of mere " annexationism." 

Let us consider these four points of view in succession, 
remembering that there were traces of every one of them in 
the various claims which one state or another set forth in its 
plea for consideration, at the time of the making of the new 
map of Europe in 1919-20. 

Mere "land hunger," the victor's claim to take all that 
he chooses, on no mere pretence of " balance of power," or 
" strategic necessity," or " natural geographical frontiers," 
or " racial affinities," or the " protection of oppressed 



164 THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 

nationalities," is the most ancient and most blatant principle 
of all. One had supposed that this " good old rule and simple 
plan," which inspired Nebuchadnezzar or Alexander the 
Great, was dead since the days of Napoleon's shameless 
annexations of Rome and Tuscany, Holland and Hamburg, 
Dalmatia and Catalonia, and all the other unconsidered 
scraps on which he laid hands without any real claim save 
that of the sword. The later annexations of the nineteenth 
century were generally cloaked under one or the other of 
the less truculent pleas. And the Congress of Vienna when 
it handed over unwilling populations to alien masters, had 
the decency to talk of old dynastic claims when it put the 
Austrian in Milan or restored the Bourbons to Naples, or of 
the " balance of power " when it perpetuated that already 
committed crime the partition of Poland. Napoleon III 
harped on geography and racial affinities when he took over 
Nice and Savoy from King Victor Emmanuel. So did 
Bismarck when he stripped France of Alsace — though for 
the even more iniquitous annexation of Lorraine, or rather 
of its Metz corner, Germany — or its military statesmen — 
had to plead the " strategic necessity " justification. When 
we reflect that these unscrupulous personages thought 
themselves forced by the spirit of the times to formulate 
pleas less offensive than the mere right of the sword, it was 
a distinct moral set-back to find in 1919-20 claims cropping 
up that had not the decency to cloak themselves under 
strategical, geographical, or ethnological disguises, and which 
spoke openly of dividing up the goods of the vanquished. I 
read plenty of pamphlets and newspaper articles at the time 
of the Versailles Conference, nearly all non-British I am glad 
to say — which might have been written by Machiavelli 
or Napoleon. Fortunately, the greater part of these ambitions 
have been frustrated, but there are one or two corners in 
more than one of the recently-signed treaties which have the 
old twang about them. The greatest sufferers have been 
the shrunken Austrian and Hungarian Republics of to-day. 
Nor has very much been said during the recent years about 
the second old-fashioned plea, with which the eighteenth-cen- 
tury diplomatist used to work when treaties were on hand — that 



THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 165 

which put forth the so-called " Balance of Power" as its ideal, 
and talked of the " compensations " which one member 
of an alliance owed to the others. This useful and iniquitous 
word " compensations " presupposes that there are always 
available lands or sources of wealth that can be cut or pared 
like cheeses, without any moral hindrance. In practice it 
always meant the mangling or even the extinction of small 
(or misgoverned and powerless) neighbours for the benefit 
of the strong. It may sometimes be the case that small states 
have continued to exist for no very obvious reason — they 
may not represent a national unit, or even a convenient 
geographical unit. They may have been called into existence 
by a lawyer-like partition of a heritage, or have been created 
to serve as an appanage or an endowment for some forgotten 
person or dynasty. Such is Luxemburg to-day ; such were 
Parma or Lucca the day before yesterday. Nevertheless 
the principle that states destitute of any obvious raison 
d'etre may be swallowed by their greater neighbours, without 
any reference to their own desires or local patriotism, is not 
only immoral, but fraught with ruin for the devourer in the 
end. The example of the Hapsburg empire of Austria is 
the best warning — built up laboriously by many generations 
of marriages, exchanges and conquests, out of heterogeneous 
and unwilling elements, it finally flew to pieces in a moment 
in November, 1918, because the union had not been with 
the consent of the united nationalities, but imposed upon 
them, contrary to their will. 

I have nothing to say against voluntary unions, aggre- 
gations by mutual consent, whether of units of the same 
racial group — like the states that went to make the United Italy 
of 1860 — or of units heterogeneous in blood and language, 
but with closely united geographical or political connexion, 
like the Cantons of Switzerland, or the Walloon and Flemish 
halves of Belgium. Such unions no man will condemn. 
It is the free consent and the will to hold together that matters, 
not race, or language, or religion — as witness Switzerland. 
But where the wish to cohere and to coalesce does not exist, 
the treaty-maker draws his boundaries in vain, however 
much he may talk of race and language, of manifest geo- 



166 THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 

graphical destiny, or of commercial ties and unity of culture. 
Why could Norway never be united to Sweden ? All these 
compelling causes were in operation to bind them together ; 
nevertheless after nearly a century of involuntary union they 
flew apart — simply because the wish to unite never existed ; 
reason might dictate union, but national sympathy and 
antipathy is not guided by reason. 

The only cases in which annexations on the " compensation " 
principle have not been obviously deleterious to the annexer, 
sooner or later, may be found in cases where the people of 
the land transferred had no particular preference for their 
former status, or loyalty to it, and no particular objection to 
the power which was taking them over. When there are 
two or more states in the same large national group which 
are competing with each other, it may be a matter of com- 
parative indifference to the inhabitants of a city or a county 
whether they are inside the boundary of one or the other. 
This was a common feature in the middle ages, before national 
states had grown up. In fourteenth or fifteenth century 
Italy a citizen of Brescia or Verona would undoubtedly have 
preferred independence in a minute city-republic. But if 
this was impossible, as sad experience showed, it did not 
so much matter to him whether he became a subject of the 
Duke of Milan or of the Doge of Venice. Or similarly a few 
centuries later, an inhabitant of Arras or Douai or Lille felt 
no enduring resentment when he was taken out of the dead 
non-national aggregation that was called the Spanish Nether- 
lands, and put inside the limits of the Kingdom of France. 
He owed no reasoned loyalty to Philip IV or Charles II of 
Spain, and took no interest in those distant and unseen person- 
ages. He was certainly not worse governed after the change 
of masters ; he fell in among old neighbours of the same 
language, religion, and culture. The generation born after 
the annexation became good Frenchmen, and had no desire 
to be anything else. A more surprising instance was the 
contemporary union of Alsace to France, when an annexation 
(or series of annexations) carried out by the high hand and 
with no plea of justice, turned out a success, because the 
Alsatians had in the seventeenth century no loyalty to a non- 



THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 167 

existent Germany. The idea of United Germany did not 
then exist : the land was divided into hostile camps which 
hated each other more than they hated the foreigner. The 
Alsatians actually gained by ceasing to be outlying subjects 
of the distant Hapsburgs, or denizens of small and powerless 
principalities and municipalities, and so far recognized the 
gain that within far less than a century they had become 
French in sympathy, and fought more loyally than many 
old French departments for the Republic of 1792, and the 
Empire that followed. 

All this, we may note, was in days before the modern con- 
ception of nationality had developed in many parts of Europe. 
The difference that was made by the development of that 
conception was shown by the fact that the Alsatians of 
1871 could never be made into Germans again by the re- 
annexation to Germany carried out by Bismarck, though 
their ancestors had been made into Frenchmen easily enough 
two hundred years before. And this was despite of the 
fact that geography, language, and ancient history were all 
in favour of the union with Germany, and against the union 
with France. Yet after fifty years of forcible re-absorption 
into the modern Bismarckian Empire, the spirit of Alsace 
remained thoroughly French ; only the German immigrants 
forcibly planted in on top of the indigenous population were 
favourable to the restoration of the political situation that 
had existed throughout the Middle Ages. The explanation 
simply was that national feeling did not exist in 1670, but 
had become perfectly well developed by 1870. 

But cases like those of French Flanders, or Alsace, where 
the lands annexed by the Bourbons in the seventeenth century 
became thoroughly incorporated with the annexing state, 
because they had no loyalty to the state from which they 
were taken, were exceptional. Where national feeling, and 
active dislike to the conqueror, actually did exist, at the 
moment of the annexation, it was not one century or two 
that could reconcile the conquered to the change. The 
classical case, of course, is Poland, where the principle of 
" compensations," the cutting up of an old racial unit by 
its neighbours for their common profit, was carried out to 



168 THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 

its most shameless extreme. All those three neighbours, 
Russia, Prussia and Austria, are very properly expiating their 
crime a hundred and twenty years after. They sinned against 
the cardinal law of nationality in their greed ; they bought 
unwilling and resentful subjects, who could never be recon- 
ciled, and who tore themselves loose at the first opportunity. 
Who would have dared in 1900 to say that such an oppor- 
tunity would ever come ? Poland looked so helpless — 
her spoilers were so all-powerful ! But now we have a Poland 
in resurrection, with free access to the Baltic, and boundaries 
corresponding to those of the real Polish nationality (not, 
of course, to the artificial Polish empire of the seventeenth 
or eighteenth centuries), a state which if only it can learn its 
lesson and keep free of the old Polish curse of faction, should 
serve as a barrier against the German Drang nach Osten on the 
one side, and keep anarchic Russia from advancing into 
Central Europe on the other. It is strange, and inspiring as 
an example of retributive justice, to see the fate of eighteenth- 
century Poland revenged on all the three neighbours who 
plundered her in 1792 and 1795 on the plea of " compensations." 
They are now what she was then, writhing in faction and 
civil tumult, breaking up into fractions, a miserable spectacle. 
All the morals and sermons that used to be read to the old 
Polish oligarchy of the eighteenth century, may be rehearsed 
now with complete justice by Polish preachers to the three 
robber-states who accomplished the crimes of 1772, 1793 
and 1795. Let us hope that the preachers may also apply 
the moral at home. New Poland sometimes shows that 
she is the legitimate issue of old Poland, by displaying the 
old Polish failings. 

The word " compensations " was, fortunately, not sounded 
as a dominating note during the discussions of 1919. But 
we may run upon the idea not unfrequently in the writings 
of foreign publicists, and in the speeches of foreign statesmen. 
There is, for example, a strong belief on the Continent that 
Great Britain came through the war with less suffering and 
more profit than her allies. Her part in the victory is deliber- 
ately undervalued, her contribution in men's lives mis-stated, 
her colonial and commercial gains absurdly overvalued. 



THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 169 

I have seen in French, and Italian newspapers astonishing 
statements concerning the freedom of Britain from all taxation, 
and the universal prosperity in her cities. Hence the deduction 
that, to compensate for this alleged gain on her part, her 
allies must be allowed to repudiate their debts to her — and 
not only so, but be given leave to seek further territorial 
compensations from the vanquished enemy, on one excuse 
and another. The French claim to the whole Rhineland, 
the Italian claim to deprive the Jugo-Slavs of their Dalmatian 
seaports, have both been supported on occasion by the plea 
that nations that have suffered greatly must not come off 
less well from the settlement than an ally who has gained 
much and suffered nothing. That such " compensations " 
imply the forcible enslaving of unwilling aliens is passed over 
as a necessary consequence of victory, and as the right of 
the conqueror. Looking to another quarter, I should not be 
indisposed to recognize the trace of some theory of " com- 
pensations " in the details of the cutting short of the borders 
of Hungary for the benefit of the three powers of the " Little 
Entente." It certainly looks as if concessions to one of the 
newly-created national kingdoms had been carefully balanced 
by concessions to the other two. 

But, as I said before, the word " compensations " has 
not been heard so frequently during the last few years as the 
two phrases which I have set down as representing the third 
and the fourth theories of boundary-building, which were 
all too popular in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. 
I mean the phrases " natural frontiers " and " strategical 
necessity " ; both of these were unhappily prominent in the 
discussions of 1919. Now, as to " natural frontiers " it 
seems at first sight quite plausible to lay down the rule that 
state boundaries ought to follow marked lines of geographical 
demarcation, and to argue that each of two neighbouring 
nations will be benefited by an agreement to draw their 
frontier along a great natural obstacle, a lofty watershed of 
mountains, a very broad river, or a chain of lakes and marshes. 
But there are three fatal objections to the general application 
of this attractive theory. The first is that there are many 
broad regions in Europe and elsewhere, where commanding 



170 THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 

natural boundaries do not exist — as, for example, between 
France and Belgium, Poland and Germany, or Poland and 
Russia. This, of course, might be put aside as a mere formal 
objection. The defender of the theory might say, " we 
cannot use them where they do not exist, but at least let 
us use them where they do exist." In reply I must urge 
that even where such marked physical features are to be 
found, it may prove unwise or immoral to use them. For, 
to begin with, two rival powers develop the most divergent 
views as to what are their " natural boundaries " ? All through 
the nineteenth century French political geographers hankered 
after the idea that the Rhine is the obvious natural limit of 
France eastward, as it was in Julius Csesar's Gaul. But to 
Germans it was equally obvious that watersheds are more 
correct " natural boundaries " than rivers, and therefore 
that the Vosges and the Ardennes are the proper westward 
frontier of Germany. Many German geographers went a 
step further, and claimed that the whole plainland of Holland 
and Flanders was only a westward extension of the great level 
flat of Northern Germany, and ought to be incorporated in 
the same political unit. Less familiar but equally virulent 
disputes existed between Serbian and Bulgarian and Greek, 
in the Balkan Peninsula. Bulgarians maintained that because 
the inner lands of Thrace were distinctly Bulgarian, it was 
their bounden duty to extend themselves to the obvious 
geographical limit of those lands — the sea coast — although 
there was absolutely no Bulgarian population along the 
water's edge, but only Greeks and Turks. Another example 
is the claim of Italy to the line of the Brenner Pass and the 
crest of the main chain of the Alps, because there lies the 
watershed between the rivers which flow south to the Po 
and the Adriatic, and those which flow north to the Danube. 
It is, I think, one of the most unhappy incidents in the whole 
of the Treaty-making of 1919 that this claim was conceded, 
with the result that 300,000 German-speaking Tyrolese 
on the Upper Adige and the Eisach have been turned 
against their will into Italian subjects, so that a " Tyrolia 
irredenta" has been created, quite as large as the "Italia 
irredenta " whose existence was such a legitimate grievance 



THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 171 

to Italy during the days of the Hapsburg Empire. To-day 
on " geographical first principles " the valley of Andreas 
Hofer, the great Tyrolese patriot, the home of all Tyrolese 
national sentiment, has become Italian soil ! And this 
enslaving of 300,000 German-speaking Tyrolese has been 
allowed by the other allied powers, despite of their professed 
adherence to the principle of " self-determination," which 
was carefully and honourably applied in other regions of 
Europe, such as Sleswig, Upper Silesia, or the regencies of 
Allenstein and Marienwerder, where the population was 
allowed every facility for choosing its own nationality. 

Against the whole principle of " natural boundaries " it 
may, perhaps, be sufficient to quote one crucial instance 
where the strict use of it would obviously produce results 
to which even the most insane advocate of this mischievous 
theory could hardly give his approval. I allude, of course, 
to that interesting anomaly Switzerland, which, on the theory 
of " natural frontiers," ought most certainly to be divided 
up between France, Italy, and Germany. For no one can 
dispute that Canton Ticino, along the river of that same name, 
is south of the watershed of the Alps, and belongs to the 
basin of the Po, and therefore to Italy. While Cantons 
Vaud, Valais and Geneva are equally obvious as the upper 
reaches of that essentially French river the Rhone, which 
descending from them runs for hundreds of miles through 
the heart of Southern France. And the remaining larger 
half of Switzerland, to the north and east, being drained by 
rivers falling into the Rhine (or in one small corner into the 
Inn) should I suppose be allotted to Germany and the 
new Austrian Republic. When we add that Canton Ticino 
speaks Italian and was in the Middle Ages part of the Duchy 
of Milan, that Geneva, Vaud and Valais speak French and 
belonged to the kingdom of Burgundy, and that Zurich, 
Basle, Lucerne, Schaffhausen and all Northern Switzerland 
speak German and were part of the essentially German Duchy 
of Suabia, it must be obvious that in the eyes of the geo- 
graphical purist, the real believer in " natural boundaries," 
Switzerland ought to be cut up to-morrow, trisected, and 
handed over piecemeal to its proper owners. Yet I think 



172 THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 

that even the most insane and fanatical exponent of the 
" natural boundaries " theory would shrink from proposing 
this infamy. If so, and if we once admit that the theory 
cannot always be applied, I fail to see why its principles 
should have any more validity if applied to the German- 
speaking parts of Tyrol, to the Balkan Peninsula, the Jugo-Slav 
regions adjacent to Trieste and Fiume, or the Rhineland. 
The talk about natural boundaries is often a mask for 
chauvinism and land-hunger. 

The case is still worse with the fourth theory of boundaries, 
that which employs the phrase " strategic necessity." There 
is a close resemblance between this and the theory of " natural 
frontiers. ' ' The only difference between them is that in the one 
case chauvinism or land-hunger has concealed itself under the 
cloak of inevitable geography, while in the other it casts 
aside the cloak, and emerges naked and unashamed, and 
simply sets forth the will of the stronger to take what is 
convenient for him from a vanquished enemy. For it is 
invariably the victor who talks of strategic necessity, and 
pretends to dread the future revenge of the vanquished. 
So did Napoleon in his day, so did the German General Staff 
in 1871, when they insisted on adding Metz, a great fortress 
but an absolutely French city, for whose annexation no decent 
historical or racial excuse could be given, to the already 
earmarked Alsace, for whose reunion with Germany much 
more plausible justification could be made. But the most 
striking exposition of this immoral theory that I have ever 
seen is contained in Italian contemporary pamphlets and 
speeches, of which I have come upon many, which set forth 
quite openly the claim that the 700,000 Jugo-Slavs of Dalmatia 
ought to be annexed to Italy, because the eastern side of that 
peninsula is singularly destitute of ports and there is practically 
none from Venice to Brindisi — while Dalmatia has countless 
harbours which might in a possible future war between Italy 
and the newly-established Jugo-Slav state, be dangerous lairs 
of submarines, and bases for raiding squadrons. 

The plea of " strategic necessity," always a mark of 
chauvinism and greed, has become even more unconvincing 
than of old since the late war. For recent military experience 



THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 173 

has shown that so far are strategical lines, as drawn by the 
military geographer, from being the only positions that can 
be held, that almost any line, drawn across the map in despite 
of natural obstacles, can be held by a good army that knows 
its job, and has plenty of barbed wire and big guns. The 
most impossible lines, which seemed to defy all military 
rules, have been repeatedly held against the most formidable 
attacks — such were our own Ypres salient, held for years, 
the German salient at St. Mihiel, east of Verdun, or the line 
along the Piave on which the Italians stopped the Austrian 
advance after their disaster at Caporetto — which said disaster 
incidentally proved that a line of the most formidable strategic 
excellence, such as all specialists would approve, cannot 
necessarily be held under all conditions. The moral factor 
in strategy is more important than any geography, and 
much prized lines of defence studded with strong fortresses 
may prove broken reeds in the moment of need, like Namur 
or Antwerp, or useless to affect the general trend of a war 
like the great group of Russian strongholds round Warsaw, 
in 1915. They have often in past years been mere army -traps 
to ruin their holders, like Magdeburg in 1806, or Metz in 
1870, or Plevna in 1877. Wherefore I hold that more than 
ever to-day " strategical necessity " should be marked down 
as an immoral plea, the cloak of unscrupulous lust for 
annexation. 

But to come to the last lap of my argument — the critic 
may perhaps observe that if we have stigmatized boundaries 
by " compensation," and " natural frontiers," and " strategical " 
boundaries as one and all immoral and objectionable, we 
are driven back on to the sole principle of the will of the 
inhabitants of a district, what President Wilson called " self- 
differentiation," as our guiding principle. And this principle, 
the critic will say, and with perfect truth, is hard to apply 
in some cases, and absolutely incapable of application in others. 
This must be frankly conceded if we wish to be honest. Though 
in Western Europe there are few regions where it is impossible 
to draw a just and satisfactory frontier, the same is not the 
case in Eastern Europe, or many parts of Western Asia. 
There are terrible problems for an " honest broker " on all 



174 THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 

the frontiers of Poland, in what was once Hungary, in the 
Baltic lands, most of all perhaps in the Balkan Peninsula 
and in Transcaucasia. We find regions like the Banat, or 
Macedonia, or South Thrace, in which it may be said that 
no race has the complete numerical superiority which entitles 
it to decide on the fate of a district, in which it lives mixed 
up with not one but perhaps two, or even three, alien 
nationalities. And we find regions, such as some parts of 
Eastern Galicia, and of Upper Silesia, and of Sleswig, where 
the balance of races is so nice that we ask ourselves whether 
the vote of 51 per cent, of the people must absolutely and 
entirely override that of 49 per cent. Or, again, we may 
find tracts where national feeling is so doubtful or undeveloped 
that it would seem that the people themselves hardly know 
what they want, as in many parts of the Ukraine, and in the 
not far distant White Russia. Often districts with a local 
majority of one race are cut off by considerable intervening 
tracts, of alien blood and sympathy, from the nearest large 
patch of their own nationality ; this is very much the case 
in Transylvania, in some parts of Macedonia, and on the 
borders of Poland and of East Prussia. 

Now it is clear that no sane drawer of state-boundaries 
could sanction the creation of a permanent political settlement 
which should make the map of Eastern Europe resemble an 
enlarged edition of the county of Cromarty on the map of 
Scotland, by which national states should be divided into 
several isolated enclaves or patches, not cohering, but separated 
from each other by long distances. What is the remedy ? 
We cannot in the twentieth century call for a new Senacherib 
or Nebuchadnezzar, who should deport all small outlying 
groups of population, and replant them in districts more 
geographically convenient. Something of the sort might 
conceivably be done on a small scale, by bargain and consent 
between the two states concerned, each undertaking to find 
land for its kinsmen on the acres from which aliens have been 
removed. Even so, every deported farmer would grumble 
that he had lost by the exchange — for such is human nature. 
But on a large scale, where old national traditions are con- 
cerned, and the people who are to be transferred possess a 



THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 175 

history and a national consciousness, this can hardly be done — 
it seems to sin against fundamental human rights. Though 
to be sure there have been cases seen quite lately where racial 
minorities, left behind after a change of sovereignty, have 
been seen to migrate in order to " follow the old flag," as 
happened more or less with the Turkish minority in Thessaly, 
after that region had been made over to Greece in 1878, and 
with many ardently Francophil Alsatians in 1871, after the 
annexation of Alsace to Germany. The converse, by the 
way, seems to be happening in Alsace now, since many irre- 
concilable German settlers in that country are retiring to their 
place of origin. But such movements cannot be relied upon 
to settle our difficulty ; more often the local tie is too strong, 
and the persons affected stay behind — and grumble not 
unnaturally. 

The best solution that can be suggested for such problems 
is a not wholly satisfactory one. This is the grant of liberal 
local privileges to alien enclaves of population, which must 
yet be made to understand that they have no racial autonomy 
as against the nation to which they have had to be assigned 
because it encircles them on all sides. I mean such privileges 
as the concession of the official use of their own language, 
alongside with that of the language of the state, and full 
protection for their schools, churches and other cultural 
necessities. These are the kind of rights which we have 
granted to the Dutch of Cape Colony, to use a familiar instance. 

The difficulty is that the administration of such privileges 
in practical detail generally leads to friction. The state 
is normally accused of being unsympathetic and arbitrary ; 
the privileged minority is accused of being captious, provo- 
cative, and irrationally suspicious. And generally there 
is considerable truth in each of the countercharges. The 
case becomes especially difficult when there exists at a short 
distance from the discontented enclave of population, a national 
state to which this outlying patch belongs by culture and 
sympathy. Then the malcontents always receive moral 
aid and support from outside against their own Government, 
as the Alsatians till the Great War used to receive from 
France, or the Italians of Trieste from Italy, or the Greeks 



176 THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 

in Turkey from Greece. It is hard to see a complete remedy 
for this ; a state entrusted with the Government of alien 
minorities should possess an almost superhuman capacity 
for patience and justice, which (while men are men) it is 
difficult to expect. 

There is one larger and more heroic solution for such a 
problem, the ideal which may be seen in Switzerland, and 
to a certain extent in the Dominion of Canada and the Union 
of South Africa — that is in the organization into a composite 
federal state of the whole group of diverse races, whose close 
juxtaposition and geographical interpenetration causes the 
difficulty. For, of course, the lot of people dwelling in one 
of these racial " pockets " or enclaves would be quite different 
if the state with which they are incorporated is not a wholly 
alien one, but a composite unit, in which their own outlying 
countrymen, a few score miles away, form part of the governing 
body. 

Take, for example, the Balkan Peninsula — the most puzzling 
perhaps of all the problems before us. The wisest heads in 
that quarter of the world have already thought of this solution ; 
the idea was at the bottom of that " Balkanic League," of 
which M. Venizelos was long the prophet and exponent. 
Local minorities, he taught, might learn to tolerate their 
position, if the supreme governing power was one in which 
their co-nationals elsewhere, who were local majorities in 
their own corner, had an important part. The idea of the 
League was undoubtedly a good way out of the difficulty — 
a very good idea indeed in 1913. But is this solution possible 
to-day, in the case of peoples who during the Great War 
have been engaged in bitter strife with each other ? In 
1915-18 the Bulgarians, in alliance with Austria, the hereditary 
enemy of Serbia, and Turkey, the hereditary enemy of Greece, 
committed atrocities on a very large scale among the Greek 
and Serbian populations which had fallen for a time under 
their sway. Indeed we are not doing them injustice if we 
say that they actually attempted to exterminate the Greek 
and Serbian elements in Macedonia by fire and sword. Can 
it be expected that within any short period of years the 
injured nationalities, who have now come to their own, owing 



THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 177 

to the general victory of the Allies, will consent to take 
Bulgarians into complete and equal partnership, and give 
them their aliquot share in the organization and administration 
of a general Balkan League ? It is interesting to see that 
the Bulgarians have now begun to talk on this topic, and to 
place all blame for their own crimes and misdoings on their 
dethroned monarch Ferdinand and his political satellites. 
But the question is now not what Bulgarians may think, 
but what are the views of the Serbian and Greek peoples. 
They would be more than human if they were to see much 
attraction in the idea of being partially governed by the 
representatives of a nation which is not only an old enemy, 
but has during the last few years displayed the extreme of 
chauvinism and barbarity. It is probable that the happy 
idea of the Balkan League must remain an aspiration for the 
future, when hatreds have had time to cool, rather than a 
practicable scheme to be applied in the immediate present. 
It is a case of " wait and see." 

The idea of federalization applied in this corner of Eastern 
Europe may lead us up to the idea of its application in other 
regions. There are clear opportunities for its use among 
the minor states on the Baltic — Finland, Esthonia, Latvya, 
Lithuania — or again in the minor states beyond Caucasus, 
Georgia and her lesser neighbours, when once they shall 
have got loose from the Bolshevik domination. Yet in each 
case there seem to be local jealousies and suspicions hindering 
what seems the best road to safety and survival — perhaps 
the only road, in view of dangers from without to states 
none of which are by themselves of any great strength. 

But the moral seems to be that if localism and particularism 
be so dangerous to minor states, the only remedy lies in 
extending the idea of federalism so widely, that it ceases 
to be a mere attempt to combine close neighbours in an 
unwilling union, and becomes something much larger. I 
allude, of course, to the great scheme on which so much is 
being spoken and written at present — the idea to which in 
its widest form the name of the " League of Nations " has 
been given. So many writers and speakers have given so 
many different shapes to that attractive ideal, that he would 

tj.c.d. n 



178 THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 

be a bold man who would venture a definite pronouncement 
upon any shape that it ought to take. Critics have pointed 
out the practical difficulties that must attend its inception, 
its organization and its practical working. The difficulties 
are obvious. On what principle would the seats in the govern- 
ing council of the world be allotted ? Can states with an evil 
record like Germany, Bulgaria, or Mexico be admitted at 
once to take their part therein ? What would be the 
organization and composition of the international armed 
force which must be the ultimate executor of the mandates 
of the omnipotent central board ? Granting that such a 
force is created, adequate and competent to discharge the 
purpose for which it is raised, what are to be the methods of 
punishment for disobedient and vanquished dissidents ? 

One may suggest dozens of such questions, all plausible 
and hitting on real difficulties and dangers. The discussion 
of them might be interminable — as recent experience in the 
United States of America seems to show. Yet I am optimist 
enough to believe that " where there is a will there is a way," 
and that no small part of the problem is solved when we 
find that all over the world there is a general and reasoned 
approbation of the main ideal of the " League of Nations." 
Plausible as are the criticisms that are put forth against it, 
the important thing is to note that they are criticisms not 
blank denials of the ideal. Few or none among the critics 
dare to repudiate the whole scheme ; they carp at details, 
because they dare not deny the moral justice or reason of the 
ideal itself. And this is a great gain : the aspiration being 
once set travelling round the world, time is its ally. We 
must be patient, and allow the propaganda to make its own 
way, without hurrying it on, or allowing ourselves to be 
discouraged by temporary checks and hindrances. For my 
own part, I believe that as the world realizes more and more 
what the horrors of the next great war would be, every one, 
save a Bolshevik, must see that such a war ought never to 
be allowed to come about. It may seem, perhaps, a truism or 
a piece of banal optimism to say, in these troublous times, 
that if an ideal is the right one, it will conquer in the end. 
But believing in that ideal as I do, I am content to leave 



THE DRAWING OF BOUNDARIES 179 

the problem to be pondered over by each individual in his 
own heart. I do no more than repeat the words of Gamaliel 
of old. The ancient Jewish teacher said, when the first 
Christian doctrine was laid before him, " If this counsel be 
of men it will perish ; but if it be of God, beware lest ye be 
found fighting against God." 



IX 

THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY, 1526-60 

It used, till February 18, 1920, to be the special boast 
and glory of the English currency that for more than a thou- 
sand years it has maintained its original weight and purity 
in a far higher degree than any of its neighbours. Until Mr. 
Austin Chamberlain in a moment of panic debased our silver 
money by a 50 per cent, alloy of base metal, only one severe 
shock has been given to the credit of the English coinage 
for about a thousand years. Save in this one single case, 
the currency has been spared by even the worst, the weakest, 
and the most unfortunate of our rulers. In the clash of 
the Norman Conquest, in the evil days of King John, in 
the long thriftless administration of Henry III, in the anarchy 
of the Wars of the Roses, in the sharpest stress of the Great 
Rebellion, no ruler of England ever laid hands on the coin 
of the realm to alloy its purity. It is true that in the 
attrition of the ages the first of English coins, the venerable 
silver penny, has sunk to about one-third of its original weight, 
though it retained its original quality. Offa, its first creator, 
struck it to the standard of 22 grains ; King George's silver 
Maundy penny of 1920 weighs 7 J grains. But this shrinkage 
had been due not to deliberate dishonesty in any series of 
kings or ministers, but to the variations of the ratio between 
gold and silver in the last five centuries, since the day when 
Edward III first added gold money to the currency of the 
realm. When Edward III, or Henry IV, or Edward IV, 
from time to time reduced the size of their silver pieces, they 
did it to bring under-valued silver money into its proper 
relation to their gold coins, not in order to fill their own 
pockets. Tor from the year 1344 to the year 1816 England 
was cursed with a bimetallic system of currency, and felt 

180 



THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 181 

acutely every variation in the ratio of the red and the white 
metal. Whenever silver rose in value the Government set 
things right for the moment, by reducing the weight of the 
silver money. In the course of time another crisis arose, 
and then came a further reduction. This process only ceased 
with the final introduction of a single gold standard in the 
days of our own grandfathers. In no single period, save 
in the years 1543—51, was this cutting down of the weight 
of silver in the penny or the shilling a dishonest and 
deliberately immoral act on the part of the Govern- 
ment. 

Foreign currencies were not so fortunate. In no other 
country of Europe has the original coin-standard shrunk so 
little as in England. In the year 800 the English penny 
of King Offa and the denarius of Charles the Great, current 
in France, Germany, and Italy, were the same in all respects ; 
for OfiVs coin was a deliberate copy of that of Charles, so 
that the word denarius, the proper name of the Frankish 
coin, was always used as the Latin equivalent of our own 
penny. Hence comes the d. printed at the head of our pence- 
column in the reckonings of to-day. The English penny, 
as we have already said, has decreased to one-third of its 
former self in the last thousand years. But the fall of the 
denarius of the continent has been far more humiliating. 
The Carlovingian denarius was the parent of the French 
denier, the German pfennig, the Italian danaro. Now, 
the denier in France had by the end of the eighteenth cen- 
tury shrunk into one-twelfth of the sou, which was itself 
one-twentieth of the livre, a coin practically equivalent to 
the modern franc. A denier of Louis XV was therefore 
only worth about one-seventieth of a denarius of Charlemagne. 
Similarly, in Germany on the eve of the Great War of 1914, 
the pfennig was one-hundredth part of the silver mark, a 
coin of about 85 grains. It started at about 22 grains of 
silver; but would in 1914 (if so small a piece could have 
been struck) have been of about the weight of -85 of one 
grain. All other European money standards show similar 
results. 

It may seem absurd to link together in a common con- 



182 THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 

demnation, as the only two debasers of the English silver 
currency, Henry VIII and Mr. Austin Chamberlain. The 
svelte and austere figure of the modern statesman does not 
contrast more strongly with the Tudor king's sinister grossness 
than do their mentality and their morality. Nevertheless it 
remains true that the only two occasions when the English 
coinage was deliberately mishandled and abused, grew abomin- 
able and became unsightly, were in the reign of Henry VIII 
and in the Chancellorship of Mr. Austin Chamberlain. It is 
with the offences of the former that we have to treat in this 
paper. When that prince ascended the throne, the English 
coinage was in an eminently satisfactory condition. With 
all his faults Henry VII had been a thrifty and economical 
administrator, the kingdom was unusually prosperous under 
his rule, and the growth of monetary transactions is shown 
by the fact that — first of all English sovereigns — he was 
able to coin large gold and silver money. The shilling, pre- 
viously mere money of account, was by Henry of Richmond 
produced as a fine piece weighing 144 grains, and bearing 
on its obverse the King's head, the first true portrait ever 
seen on English money. Similarly the double-rial, or 20s.- 
piece, which was soon afterwards to be called the " sovereign," 
appeared in the year 1489. Thus Henry VII simplified all 
calculations by giving to his nation the tangible pieces of 
money which corresponded to the names in use. How hard 
it must have been to count up large sums of money into 
pounds and shillings, when the coins in hand were angels 
of 6s. 8d., and groats of Ad. with their fractions, we find it 
difficult to realize. To break with tradition and give a tan- 
gible shape to the old names was an unqualified boon. If 
we ask the causes of Henry's innovation, we must content 
ourselves with a general answer that the growth of monetary 
transactions, to the prejudice of payments in kind, must 
continually have been increasing : that although prices had 
remained practically stationary for an unprecedentedly long 
period, yet the quantity of business was growing, and that 
therefore people who were continually expending shillings 
felt the inconvenience of having to pay everything in groats ; 
e.g. if anyone had to pay a 5s. bill, how much more time 



THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 183 

and trouble would he take in counting out 15 groats than 
5 shillings ! Similarly, in dealing with a large sum of pounds, 
there was enormous convenience in counting out 100 sovereigns 
rather than 300 angels. 

It is well worth our while to detect in Henry VII's coin- 
age the working of the artistic spirit of the Renaissance as 
well as that of the growth of trade. Ever since Edward III 
the aspect of English money had remained the same ; the 
conventional full-faced king's head, with its wooden mediaeval 
smile, was repeated for king after king without variation : 
Edward III might be an old and bearded man, Richard II 
a young boy, but the same stereotyped head was repeated 
from the coin of the former on to that of the latter. Simi- 
larly, the noble still retained its king standing with drawn 
sword in his tub-like little sailing boat, the " ship " of which 
the Flemings (making a pun which holds good in our language 
as well as in theirs) said that it should be exchanged for a 
sheep, since England's naval power was declining while its 
wool trade was ever growing larger. Henry broke with these 
time-honoured conventionalities ; he placed on the shilling 
an excellent portrait of himself with a side-face, quite unlike 
the mediaeval full-face, and showing the awakening of England 
to real, as opposed to conventional, art. So, too, on his sover- 
eign appeared a full-length figure of himself seated in state 
on his royal throne beneath his royal canopy — a handsome 
type, showing more traces of medisevalism than the portrait 
head on the shilling, but wanting the attribute of stiffness 
which it would have shown a hundred years earlier. 

Henry died in 1509, leaving behind him a treasure which 
contemporary chroniclers estimated at three or even four 
millions sterling, but which Bacon calculates at only £1,800,000. 
This last, however, was an enormous sum enough, when we 
consider the value of money at that date. It was not to 
remain much longer laid up in the cellars of Richmond 
Palace. On the side of political economy hoarding may 
be bad, but from the point of view of the English nation 
the use which Henry VIII made of his father's treasure was 
far more disastrous than the most exaggerated form of hoard- 
ing could have been. 



184 THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 

England had now for nearly sixty years remained aloof 
from the confusion of Continental politics. First the Wars 
of the Roses, then the wise policy of non-intervention pur- 
sued by Henry VII, had kept her from being sucked into 
the whirlpool. Both, Edward IV, indeed, and Henry himself, 
had appeared with armies on French soil, but their invasions 
were momentary and episodic ; they brought money to 
England rather than spent it, for each of them allowed him- 
self to be bribed into a prompt departure, and made no real 
attempt to enforce the old claims to the French crown which 
had cost so much blood and treasure during the Hundred 
Years' War. The period of non-intervention was now at 
an end, and with it was to depart the long spell of internal 
prosperity which England had enjoyed in the fifteenth 
century. 

Few historical facts are more extraordinary than the 
stationary condition of English life during the period which 
was now drawing to a close. From the Black Death to the 
beginning of Henry VIII's interference in foreign politics 
the price of living appears, if we may trust Thorold Rogers's 
figures, to have remained almost unchanged. The part of 
the nation which worked and saved was steadily maintaining 
its prosperity. Not even the great French war — a war, 
indeed, fought on French ground and to a great extent with 
French money — could stop the growth of England. The 
long struggle of York and Lancaster seems to us who look 
back on it to have been a period of horror — yet " nobody 
seemed one penny the worse," save the barons and their 
retainers, who made their way to some convenient heath 
or hill-side, and there slaughtered each other by the thousand. 
The nation sat at its ease in plenty and contentment, and 
though the rival factions slew each other before its judg- 
ment seat, cared for none of these things, like Gallio of old. 
I need hardly repeat the well-known fact that the struggle 
was waged with less general rapine and ravaging than any 
medieval civil war of which we have knowledge. Except 
the harrying of the towns along the line of the Great North 
Road by Queen Margaret's northern moss-troopers in the 
winter of 1460-1, there is hardly an instance of wanton 



THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 185 

destruction of life or property that can be quoted. 1 The 
middle and lower classes refused to take sides in the quarrel, 
and submitted to each victorious party in turn, so that 
the storm practically passed over their heads. The years 
1455—85 were a time of growing wealth, expanding commerce, 
increased civilization. When tried by that excellent test 
of prosperity, the amount of church-building which they 
show, compared with the generation before and the genera- 
tion after, they account for an astonishing number of the 
large, well-lighted, perpendicular churches which are the 
glory of Cotswold and East Anglia. The struggle, indeed, 
had no visible influence for evil on the country's prosperity ; 
perhaps it may even have worked indirectly for good ; the 
carnage of Towton and Barnet must have had a considerable 
effect in thinning that superfluous mass of " unemployed " 
— the discharged professional mercenaries bred by the long 
French War, whose descendants were a hundred years later to 
become the " sturdy and valiant beggars " of the reigns of 
Henry VIII and Edward VI. 

Our digression has, perhaps, extended too far ; let us 
return to the sixteenth century. Henry VIII was no sooner 
established on the throne than he set to work to throw away 
his father's accumulated wealth, in the pursuit of that intan- 
gible and chimerical prize, the Balance of Power. To en- 
deavour to establish any abiding status in a Europe whose 
direction was in the hands of such dishonest politicians as 
Louis XII and Maximilian of Austria, or Francis I and Charles 
V, was a pursuit as hopeless as the brain of man ever con- 
ceived. If Henry had owned the philosopher's stone, and 
possessed the patience of Job, he could not have been success- 
ful. The trimmer may find a pleasure in making his power 
felt as he swings from side to side, but he will never earn 
either honest attachment or respect. All through the thirty 
years' duel of Francis and Charles, the power of England 
was courted by the party which for the moment felt itself 
weaker ; but when the balance began to incline the other 

1 1 can only remember the Earl of Devon's sack of Exeter and the 
Earl of Wilts' plunder of Hungerford in 1459. 



186 THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 

way, Henry would find himself deserted by his friend of the 
moment, who felt that he had been supported merely because 
the balance of power required that he should not be reduced 
to too low a condition. England would then ally herself 
with her enemy of yesterday, and the whole process repeated 
itself again. 

In this endless alternation of wars Henry was enabled 
to spend two such hoards as had never before been in the 
hands of an English king — his father's savings and the plunder 
of the monasteries. When once Henry VII's accumulations 
were gone, and the long course of foreign wars entered upon, 
it became a mere matter of time to calculate in how many 
years Henry would be driven to desperate expedients to 
recruit his exchequer. From 1515 to 1523 he lived from 
hand to mouth on the proceeds of forced loans and benevo- 
lences. In the pailiament of the latter year Wolsey calculated 
that to provide for the French war then in progress, it would 
be necessary to raise £800,000, by taking the fifth of every 
man's goods and land, to be paid in four years — a demand 
of unparalleled magnitude, as the king had already got two 
shillings in the pound by way of loan. Instead of his 20 
per cent, tax, the Cardinal obtained only a grant of 5 per 
cent, for two years, and Henry's financial difficulties con- 
tinued to increase. The regime of benevolences commenced 
again, and the king was glad to get money in any manner 
devisable. In 1526 the coinage was for the first time in his 
reign made the subject of his experiments, though on a 
small scale compared to the gain which he afterwards made 
of it. 

On July 25 in that year a writ was issued : "To Thomas, 
Cardinal Archbishop of York, Legate a Latere of the See 
Apostolic, Primate of England, and Chancellor of the same," 
commanding him to carry into effect the king's desire for 
reducing his money, "and to determine its rate, value, fine- 
ness, lay, standard and print, as should by him and the 
Council be thought requisite." This lowering of the standard 
— unlike all the later experiments of Henry VIII — was not 
a deliberate attempt to debase the coinage of the realm for 
the king's benefit. It was only one of a hundred vain endea- 



THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 187 

vours to remedy a change in the ratio between gold and 
silver, by lessening the sterling contents of the coins of the 
metal which was at the moment appreciating. The causes 
given for the present lowering of the gold currency were 
the usual ones : there was an efflux of gold money from 
England, because, as the commissioners alleged, the English 
coins were so much better in quality than those of foreign 
princes " that they were taken abroad and melted in France 
and Flanders, the price of gold therein being rated so high 
that the money of the realm was transported thither by 
merchants, as well denizens as aliens." " Now the king had 
made requisition to several foreign princes for the reformation 
of their coins without effect. Also, he had commanded 
statutes against the export of money to be put in execution, 
yet nevertheless it was still secretly exported. Therefore, 
that gold and coin might remain and be plenteously brought 
into the kingdom, His Majesty deemed it necessary to make 
all money current within the realm to be of like price as it 
was valued at in foreign countries." The way His Majesty 
set to work on this laudable design was by proclaiming that 
in future the sovereign should be worth 22s. %d., the half- 
sovereign lis. 3d., and the angel 7s. Qd. — instead of 20s., 
10s., and 6s. 8d. respectively ; whereby every holder of coin 
found himself 12 per cent, richer, but every creditor, 
though receiving the same nominal amount, would receive 
only eight-ninths as much bullion. It is hardly necessary 
to remind ourselves that Henry was in the debtor class, not 
in the creditor class, at the time. Leaving his father's and 
his own early pieces to circulate at the very inconvenient 
rate newly affixed to them, Henry set to work to coin gold 
and silver at the 12 per cent, reduction : a " George 
noble " to pass for 6s. Sd., though it contained gold to the 
value of 5s. 11^. alone of the old standard ; a gold crown, 
nominally 5s., but at the old value equal to 4s. 5\d. ; and 
silver shillings, which would equal 10ft?. 

It is only fair to concede in Henry's justification that 
the difficulty of exchange which he pleaded as his excuse 
did really exist. Hall and Holinshed remind us that in 
the English coinage six angels, which weighed exactly an 



188 THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 

ounce, were exchangable for 40s., or 12 ounces of silver 
coin. But in Flanders, Zealand, and Brabant the Govern- 
ment would give silver coin to the weight of forty-four shillings, 
or 14f ounces of silver bullion, for the amount of gold con- 
tained in six English angels. It was therefore profitable 
to take English gold abroad, sell it for silver bullion, and 
bring that bullion back into England to be coined at the 
mint. Henry's fault lay in trying to be a bimetallist, to 
make both his gold and his silver coins worth their exact 
amount ; he could not see that the relative value of the 
two was continually changing, and that, unless he was pre- 
pared to alter their weight and fineness every few months, 
the equilibrium of gold and silver could not be kept up. 
There were several devices which he could have used with 
better effect from his own point of view : — 

(1) He might have left the silver coins at their old size 
and purity, and enhanced the nominal value of his gold 
coins, or " cried them up," as the phrase then was. 

(2) He might have left the names of his gold coins the 
same, but have put less gold into each, while leaving the 
silver unchanged. 

(3) He might have left the gold unchanged, but put more 
grains of silver into each of his shillings and groats. But 
all these would have been mere palliatives. It would have 
been too much to expect that Henry would take the only 
real remedial step — viz. to forbid all contracts in silver, refuse 
it when tendered for any sum over £1 or £2, and decline, 
if necessary, to coin it at the mint when presented in incon- 
venient quantities. 

As a matter of fact, by shifting the weight both of gold 
and silver, he established a momentary equilibrium in the 
exchange of gold and silver with Flanders, but committed 
himself to further difficulties in the near future. 

Henry further showed his ignorance of economical prin- 
ciples by " forbidding any person to raise the price of any 
wares and merchandise under colour of the money being 
enhanced." This practically meant that every one should 
take 12£ per cent, less for that which he had to sell than he 
would have taken in 1525. 



THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 189 

Wolsey, having charge of the coinage of which we have 
been speaking, caused such of the groats as were struck at 
York to be stamped, by way of mint mark, with his cardinal's 
hat, a fact which was remembered against him when the 
articles of 1529 were exhibited. These charged him as fol- 
lows : " The said Lord Cardinal of his further pompous and 
presumptuous mind hath enterprised to join and imprint 
the Cardinal's hat under Your Majesty's arms in your coin 
of groats at your city of York, which like deed hath not as 
yet been seen to have been done by any subject within your 
realm before this time." This, however, even Henry's judges 
could not venture to wrest into an offence against any exist- 
ing law, as it was proved that many of those who had pre- 
viously been responsible for local mints had stamped their 
family badges, and notably the bishops of Durham their 
episcopal crosier, on the coins issued in their districts. 

Henry's depreciated coinage was followed by an immediate 
rise in the price of most staple commodities, in spite of his 
absurd ordinance to the contrary. The quarter of wheat 
averaged 6s. 5fc£. in the six years previous to the recoinage ; 
in the six years after it ran to the unprecedentedly high 
average of 8s. lOd. The great impetus which cattle breeding 
was receiving at the time prevented the price of oxen and 
sheep ascending at anything like the same rate. By the 
reacting of the same cause, the price of labour remained 
stationary, for the increased cattle breeding was driving 
many agricultural labourers off the land, and thus the in- 
crease of supply of labour quite counterbalanced the decrease 
in the value of money, which (had the labour remained the 
same) must have led to something like a 12 per cent, rise 
in wages. 

Henry's first tampering with the coinage was not for some 
time renewed. By one expedient and another he made 
ends meet, till the great epoch of the plundering of the 
monasteries arrived. Then for a time he found himself as 
wealthy, and even far more wealthy, than he had been when, 
twenty-seven years before, his father's treasure-chamber 
was opened to him. From 1536 to 1542 his prodigal waste 
was supplied, and the heaped-up treasures of centuries passed 



190 THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 

through his hands, in quantities that would have glutted 
the maw of any sovereign but himself. But by 1542 all 
was exhausted, and the king again began to incur large 
debts. There was no such resource as the confiscation of 
monastic property now open to him, and six years of wilful 
waste had made him more reckless and headstrong than 
ever. In 1543 his parliament relieved him of the payment 
of the loans which he had made in the previous year, but 
this was of little account to Henry. He hated economy ; 
his old debts were no sooner cleared off than he proceeded 
to plunge into further expenditure, and in the same year 
he resumed his experiments with the currency. 

The measures of 1543 differ in kind from any other deal- 
ings with the money of the realm that had been essayed 
by Henry's predecessors. Hitherto all the successive reduc- 
tions of the coinage had been carried out with an honest 
if ignorant desire to save the realm from difficulties of foreign 
exchange, by establishing a working ratio between gold and 
silver. The recoinage of 1527 had been of this kind ; the 
weight of the currency had been tampered with but not 
its purity. Now, however, the king made a deliberate attempt 
to cheat his creditors by the issue of base money. Both 
gold and silver were attacked ; the sovereigns and nobles 
were left comparatively untouched ; the alloy in gold money 
was only increased by 2 dwt. in the pound. But in silver 
pieces the proportion of alloy was suddenly raised from one- 
thirteenth to one-fifth in each coin. Instead of being 11 
ounces 2 dwt. fine, the new money contained in each pound- 
weight 10 ounces of silver and 2 ounces of alloy. 

Nor was this all ; the pound of gold, which since 1527 
had been coined into £20 of money, was now to be coined 
into £28, and similarly the pound of silver into 48s. instead 
of 45s. 

If Henry had confined this operation to the gold there 
would have been comparatively little harm in it. The debase- 
ment of the standard was not very great, and the purity of 
it was still greater than that of many of the current gold 
coins of Europe. But the debasing of the silver was a fatal 
expedient, when gold and silver were alike legal tender to 



THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 191 

any amount. The gold was now f-f- fine, i.e. one grain of 
gold was valued at 1*252 pence. The silver, being only 
five-sixths fine, one grain of silver was thus valued at -12 
of a penny, or almost exactly one-tenth of the value of gold. 1 
But all over Europe at the time gold was worth more than 
ten times its weight of silver : in France in 1540 the pro- 
portion was 1 to 11-82, in the Low Countries 10-62, in Ger- 
many 11-38. The fact was that the influx of silver from 
America was just beginning to make itself felt, silver was 
growing appreciably cheaper than it had been of old, and 
the fact was beginning to register itself in all the continental 
currencies. 

The immediate consequence of issuing a coinage in which 
too little silver bought a golden sovereign was of course 
that gold began to pour out of England. The English mer- 
chant found himself obliged to pay his bills abroad with 
the comparatively fine gold, since the over-valued silver 
was refused by his continental correspondent, to whom it 
was only worth ten-twelfths of its nominal value. Of course, 
the export of gold was privy and secret ; English kings 
always frowned on the sending over-seas of the noble metal, 
and laid all sorts of pains and penalties on the exporter, 
when he was unfortunate enough to be caught. Neverthe- 
less, the gold went : for no government can ever be so 
Argus-eyed as to detect and prevent the merchant's well- 
laid plans for shipping off the commodity. 

The chief result, therefore, of Henry's debased silver 
coinage of 1543 was that the current gold money of the realm 
began silently and imperceptibly to vanish away over-seas, 
and to be more replaced in ordinary use by over -valued 
shillings and groats with their one-fifth of alloy. Meanwhile, 
however, by using this fatal device, the king had paid off 
debts with only five-sixths of the weight of silver that he 
would have required had the coinage been pure. 

Yet did not this content him ; hardly had a year elapsed 
when, in desperation, the now hardened criminal threw all 
prudence to the winds. 1545 was a year of misfortune for 

1 The alloy being left out of account in each case. 



192 THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 

England ; not only had she suffered the defeat of Ancrum 
Moor on the Scotch frontier, but the French were pressing 
on her with a vigour unknown before. For the first time 
since the reign of Richard II, England was seriously threat- 
ened with a foreign invasion. A French fleet had mustered 
at Havre, which far exceeded any force that Henry could 
bring against it ; there were 60,000 men on board the French 
vessels, and Francis meant mischief. Henry was at his 
wits' end ; he raised 120,000 men and distributed them 
in four armies, three on the south and east coasts, one in 
Northumberland. In addition he got together every ship 
that could be utilized for warlike purposes, from Hull to 
the Land's End. The danger was really pressing, and the 
expense enormous. After alarming all England for months 
the French came down ; they fought an indecisive naval 
battle in the Solent, they landed small forces in the Isle of 
Wight, in Sussex, and in Kent ; then sickness broke out 
in their crowded ships, and they returned to Havre without 
doing further damage. England was safe, but Henry's 
finances were at the lowest ebb that he had yet known. The 
pay and equipment of his army and navy had cost him enor- 
mous sums ; there were no resources to discharge them. 
Then all moderation was thrown aside, and the coinage treated 
in a reckless manner. Instead of f~f fine, the sovereign was 
reduced to f-f , and £30, not £28, were coined from the pound 
of gold. The weight of the silver remained the same as in 
1543, but no less than half of copper alloy was mixed with 
the good metal. By this change a grain of gold was 
now evaluated at 1*353 pence, while a grain of silver became 
worth -2 of a penny. Instead, therefore, of gold standing 
in the already too low proportion of 10 to 1 to silver, it was 
now placed at the absurd relation of 6-765 to 1. This too 
was in face of a slight but steady tendency of silver to grow 
more and more plentiful and cheap. Instead of ebbing 
slowly away, gold disappeared wholesale. But Henry had 
not yet filled up the full measure of his iniquities. In 1546 
he was still unable to pay his way, and in sheer desperation 
the gold was brought down to \\ fine, the silver to one-third 
fine, there being actually in the new shilling twice as much 






THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 193 

copper as silver. Hence the grain of gold was now worth 
1-5 pence, that of silver -3 of a penny, i.e. gold was only 
valued at five times its value in silver. The economical 
state of England was now desperate ; the greatest wrench 
that English social life had ever known, the dissolution of 
the monasteries, a change which threw a quarter of English 
property into new hands, had fallen into the same period 
as that other complication caused by the substitution of 
cattle farming for the cultivation of corn. While society 
was trying to settle down on its new basis, the king threw 
in the incalculable evils of a fearfully debased cur- 
rency. 

One would have thought that few men in England in 
those fearful times would have had leisure to joke at their 
own wretchedness. Nevertheless, tradition has preserved to 
us several jests connected with King Henry's base money. 
To understand them it is necessary to remember that the 
copper which formed the larger part of the so-called silver 
coins soon showed itself, when they had received a little 
rubbing in passing from hand to hand. Moreover, the King's 
head was represented full face on this base money, so that 
the wear first affected the most prominent part of the face, 
the nose, where the copper soon became visible. 

" Sir John Rainsford," says Camden, " meeting Comp- 
troller Brooke, who passed as having advised these later 
debasements to the King, threatened to break his head ; 
for that he had made his sovereign lord King Henry, the 
most beautiful of princes, to have a red and coppery 
nose." 

Again, we find epigrams written on the shillings or 
testoons : — * 

Testons begone to Oxenford, God be your speed, 
To study in Brasen Nose College, there to proceed ! 



1 A synonym for the coin, borrowed from the French teston, the name 
of the large piece which resembled our shilling in size and bore the 
king's head as chief type. 

U.C.D. 



194 THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 

In another place : — 

These testons look red : how like you the same ? 
"lis a token of grace : they blush for shame. 

When Henry died, in 1547, the currency had lapsed into 
a curious state owing to these last changes ; the gold had 
migrated overseas, save a very small proportion, which was 
treated as a mere commodity, and was continually changing 
in nominal value when expressed in terms of the silver. Of 
course, no one would give a sovereign of -§-£■ fine for twenty 
shillings of ^ fine. For, if expressed in terms of the old 
unadulterated coinage of the years before 1526, the former 
was still worth 14s. 2d., and the latter worth no more than 
55. 6fdl. When Strype tells us that he had seen " 21s. in 
testoons given for an old angel, to gild withal," we see that 
the rate was very reasonable. Twenty-one shillings of 120 
grains each, at | fine equal 840 grains of pure silver. An 
old angel contained 80 grains of gold, and the buyer of the 
angel was, therefore, getting his gold coin at the ratio of 10-5 
to 1, which was cheaper than he had any right to expect, 
unless, indeed, some of his twenty-one testoons were those 
of the issues of 1543 or 1545, and therefore of better silver 
than the current piece of 1546-50. A similar note may be 
made on another price of this time. The pound of raw 
silver was selling, we are told, at £3 12s. in 1548, whereas 
before the coinage of 1526 it had been worth only £2. Now, 
considering that £3 12s. in testoons contained only £1 4s. 
of pure silver, it is obvious that the purchasing power of 
coined money was still very much above the intrinsic value 
of the good metal in it, even when we take into consideration 
the fact that silver bullion had been falling since 1523 to 
some slight but appreciable extent, owing to the influx from 
the American mines. 

Henry died on January 28, 1547, and was succeeded by 
his young son, Edward VI. The ring of self-seeking courtiers 
who clustered round the boy-king determined from the first 
to conjure with the rod of their old master. But they were 
conscious of the unpopularity which his tampering with 
the coinage had produced, and tried to do furtively what 



THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 195 

Henry had been wont to do with a brazen front and unmoved 
effrontery. Their first device was to go on for more than 
a year using the old king's coin-dies to strike as much as 
they dared of the debased gold and silver under the cover 
of his name. Hence there are hardly any known coins of 
Edward's first two years — in both metals they are extremely 
rare ; on the other hand, there is a large bulk of coins bearing 
the name of Henry VIII, which, from the mint marks and 
some changes in the portrait-figure on the obverse, can 
be attributed to the first twelvemonth of the reign of his 
son. 

The earlier coinage of Edward VI, whether struck with his 
own name or his father's, is of the same metal both in gold 
and silver as that of the concluding years of Henry VIII. 
But in 1549 joyful rumours were set abroad by the govern- 
ment ; the coinage was to be purified and the new money 
was just about to appear. It came, and it was more pure 
than that which had been circulating since 1546 — but it 
was very much lighter. The new sovereign was 22 carats 
fine out of 24, as against Henry's last issues at 20 carats. 
But it only weighed 170 grains as against 192, i.e. it con- 
tained 156 grains of pure gold as against 160. The silver 
testoon was not, like the sovereign, actually less valuable 
than its predecessor, but was a half-and-half coin of silver 
and alloy ; but as it was only two-thirds the size of the last 
testoon of King Henry, it contained exactly the same number 
of grains of pure silver, viz. 40. 

The public disappointment found voice in the sermons 
of Bishop Latimer. " We have now," said he, "a pretty 
little shilling, indeed a very pretty one ! I have but one, 
I think, in my purse, and that I had almost put away yester- 
day for an old groat, 1 and for such, I believe, some will take 
them. The fineness of its silver I cannot see, but thereon 
is printed a fine sentence : ' Timor domini fons vitse.' I 
would God that this sentence were always printed in the 
heart of the king in choosing his officers." 

1 An old groat weighed 48 grains only, and the new shilling 80, so the 
good Bishop of Worcester was using some exaggeration in pretending to 
mistake one for the other. 



196 THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 

The boon of a diminished coinage was soon supplemented 
by Somerset and his friends ; the later money of Henry 
VIII was suddenly " cried down." It was said that " the 
late king having set current among his subjects testons of 
great baseness, his present Majesty perceiving that such 
coins were by reason of their baseness counterfeited both 
at home and abroad, had caused other better coins to be 
made. Now, it appeared that persons were using the old 
coins and their counterfeits in buying up victuals and mer- 
chandise, giving they cared not what for the same, so that 
they might get rid of the coin. The king, therefore, being 
minded to call in and recoin all such base money, could not 
bear the expense of receiving it back at the price at which 
it was issued. Every old teston, therefore, was, after August 
31, to be current for 9d. only." 

For this mean repudiation England had to thank Somer- 
set : his baser successor, Northumberland, treated the country 
still more cruelly ; in 1550 he issued a further edict reducing 
the old testoon from 9d. to 6d. only, as preparatory to the 
introduction of a better coinage. What was worse, he issued 
coin baser by a trifle than even that of Henry VIII. There 
were £80,000 of royal debts still outstanding ; to pay this 
off Northumberland coined silver to that value, whereof 
only a quarter — 3 ounces in the lb. — was of good metal, 
while 9 ounces were copper. This was the basest money 
England ever knew ; no great quantity, it is true, but the 
manner it was foisted on the royal creditors just before the 
great recoinage was especially disgusting. 

In 1551—52 something was at last taken in hand. A large 
issue of shillings, sixpences, and also of silver crowns and 
half-crowns (the first of those high denominations ever issued 
in England) were set in circulation. They contained 11 
ounces 1 dwt. fine out of the 12 ounces, or practically the 
old standard which was current before 1527. In weight 
they were half-way between Latimer's " pretty little teston " 
and the old shilling, being made 60 to the pound, not 72 
as the last base money had been, nor 45 as the old shilling 
of Henry VII. At the same time the sovereign was raised 
from the weight of 170 grains to 174| of 22 carats fine — i.e. 



THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 197 

it contained about the same 160 grains of pure gold as had 
the last sovereign of Henry VIII, and was appreciably better 
than those of the years 1549-51. 

Thus we see an honest standard of coinage once more 
reintroduced, and gold now standing to silver in the ratio 
of 1 to 11-05, which very fairly coincided with the average 
of continental ratios of the day, and was well calculated 
to suit the country's needs. 

There was, however, one most important step still neces- 
sary to redeem the credit of the English coinage and restore 
the currency to a healthy condition. It was absolutely 
necessary to call in two millions of base money which had 
been issued since 1543, and to exchange it for good money. 
This, however, was not done : Northumberland did not dare 
to face the enormous expense which the buying back of the 
base money, even at a great reduction on its facial value, 
would bring about. The new silver and gold began to issue 
from the mint in a fairly copious stream, but scarcely had 
they got into private hands when they seemed to disappear 
as if by magic. The fact was that they were mostly hoarded 
by the first receivers, who were doubtful if the shifty 
Northumberland might not slip back into the paths of bank- 
ruptcy, but partly exported for foreign trade. For the mer- 
chants who had dealings abroad found that the new money 
was eagerly taken by Antwerp and Amsterdam, which had 
been so loth to handle the debased issues of 1543-51. Thus 
Gresham's law, not yet the public property of financial experts, 
worked its inevitable process. The bad money drove out 
the good. The new coinage was hoarded or exported ; the 
old money alone was seen in the markets and haunts of 
men. The copious stream of fine pieces poured out in 1551-3 
seemed to vanish just as it touched the trading world. 
Prices did not fall appreciably, for " de non existentibus 
et de non apparentibus eadem est lex," and the public, seeing 
only the baser sort of coins, persisted in fixing its values by 
them. 

Meanwhile Edward died, and was succeeded by his sister 
Mary. That princess declared her intention of restoring 
the " good old times," in the matter of the coinage as well 



198 THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 

as in spiritual things. She placed on her groats the motto 
8 ' Veritas Temporis Filia. ' ' But her promises were not destined 
to be fulfilled. Her reactionary spirit changed the aspect 
of the coin back to a copy of the currency of Henry VII, 
and caused a large coinage of groats, a denomination which 
had sunk out of sight somewhat since the rise of the shilling 
and sixpence. Similarly, she restored the old types of the 
noble and angel, the sovereign in the ship, and the figure 
of St. Michael treading down the dragon. But Mary's pro- 
testations that she was about to redeem the national csedit 
were mere words. The all-important measure of buying 
back from the public the base moneys of 1543-51 was not 
taken. In her second and third years famine and scarcity 
caused a commercial crisis ; when this passed away she 
involved herself in her husband's continental wars. There 
was never time or money forthcoming for the redemption 
of the base currency. It was to no purpose, therefore, 
that all her own not very copious issues were of good 
metal ; like those of 1551-3, they were exported or 
hoarded. 

It was Elizabeth who was destined to do away with the 
base money which had cursed England for seventeen years. 
Her measures were drastic but efficient. An estimate was 
made of the bulk of depreciated coinage still outstanding 
in the hands of the public. Every one has heard of the quaint 
device which is said to have been adopted. Discreet persons 
were sent on a fixed day to all the butchers' shops of London, 
who, under colour of settling a wager as to the proportion 
of the good, bad, and indifferent money in actual circulation, 
were to persuade the butchers to allow them to count over 
and divide into categories one day's take of their shop-tills. 
On the rough evidence supplied by this enumeration the 
Council are said to have founded their estimate of the pro- 
portion of base money in use. They then issued a procla- 
mation calling in such moneys, but only allowing for each 
piece its real value in silver, not the arbitrary allowance 
of Qd. pertestoon made when Northumberland " cried down " 
the base money in the reign of King Edward. The bulk 
of the circulating medium, the coins struck between 1545 



THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 199 

and 1549, were ordered to pass and be taken at the mint 
for 4§c£. — a loss of l^d. to each holder of a testoon. The 
worst pieces of all — the £80,000 of money nine-twelfths base 
with which Northumberland had cheated the royal creditors — 
came down to 2Jc?., a loss of 3fe£. to the last unfortunate 
possessor. 

This, however, being done, Elizabeth set to work to call in 
all her father's and brother's base money, giving in exchange 
her own neat shillings and sixpences of the coinage of 1560-1. 
These were of the old standard, never seen since 1527, but 
in weight exactly similar to the last and best of Edward's 
pieces, the coinage of 1551-3. Glad to get rid of their 
base money at any price, the people readily gave in their 
currency to the exchangers whom Elizabeth sent into every 
market town. In a year the business was complete. The 
queen received 631,950 pounds troy of base metal of all sorts 
and sizes and alloys, some of it being the ten-twelfths pure 
coins of 1543, some the half-pure coins of 1545, some the 
one-third pure money of 1546-9, and a very small propor- 
tion of the basest issue of all — that of 1550. This mass 
of metal was received for £638,113 16s. 6d., that being the 
value of it by the last reduction. When it was refined, 244,416 
pounds troy were found to be pure silver, and 397,534 pounds 
alloy. To the surprise of the queen, who had expected to 
make a loss by the transaction, it was found that there had 
been given in much more of the less alloyed sort of money 
— the issue of 1543 — than had been expected. This com- 
pensating for the baseness of later metal, the mass of refined 
silver was coined down into £783,000. * Thus the queen 
got £150,000 more than she had expected. But the cost 
of coinage had to be taken into consideration, and deducting 
this the actual profit was reduced to between £15,000 and 



1 244,416 lb. at 60 shillings to the lb., would of course make only 
£733,248 of pure silver ; but the alloy at 11 dwt. per lb. accounts for the 
fact that £783,000 was coined out of the above-named weight. Pro- 
fessor Thorold Rogers at this point gets hopelessly mixed between 
pounds troy and pounds sterling, and fails to see exactly what Elizabeth 
did. 



200 THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 

£18,000. It is apparently unjust to blame Elizabeth for 
making profit out of her subjects in this point ; she had 
honestly expected to find the quantity of the worst money 
more than it was, and had so miscalculated to her own ad- 
vantage. She expected to lose £50,000 by the transaction, 
but actually she made £15,000. 

Thus the great debasement was remedied ; but its effects 
were not so easily dissipated. The prices of almost every 
product and manufacture had doubled or trebled in the 
twenty years. If we take wheat, the two decennial periods, 
1500-10 and 1510-20, show 5s. 5d. and 6s. 8d. a quarter 
as its average price ; but the value in the period 1540-50 
went up to 10s. 8d., and in that of 1550-60 to 15s. 3§d. 
Similarly the price of oxen went up from 22s. or 23s. to 75s. 
or 78s. ; that of sheep, in spite of the fact that they had 
been largely bred in the period, from 2s. 4tZ. or 2s. 5d. to 5s. 
or even 6s. It would be useless to point out further ex- 
amples. What made this rise so important, was the fact 
that wages had not risen in anything like the same ratio. 
The unskilled labourer received about Ad>. a day in 1520 ; 
in 1560 his pay had only risen to Id., or had not quite 
doubled, while the price of food had nearly trebled. This 
of course came from the fact that labour was abundant, 
owing to the wholesale evictions which followed the appro- 
priation of monastic lands and the enclosing of commons 
for sheep-farming. Moreover the practical evil of the debased 
currency had fallen on the class least able to bear it. " The 
richer sort, understanding the thing beforehand, did put 
all good money away, and passed off the base money on 
to their servants and hired men, so that when the pieces 
were cried down it was the poor who suffered, since in their 
hands for the most part the base money lay." There is 
no doubt that prices were destined to rise in the sixteenth 
century: the influx of the precious metals from America 
settled that. But if the process had worked by itself, it 
would have been slow and imperceptible. What Henry 
VIII did was to raise prices suddenly by his depreciations, 
and thereby to give a shock to the whole of English society. 
He aggravated suddenly and artificially a change which might 



THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 201 

have taken place without any great loss and discomfort to 
the nation. 

When Elizabeth's reformation of the currency took place, 
the effect of the American discoveries was making itself felt 
very distinctly. Both gold and silver, and especially the 
latter, were so far more plentiful all over Europe than they 
had been in the days before 1540, that no relapse of prices 
took place in consequence of the recoinage. No one profited, 
as had been hoped, from a universal cheapening of the articles 
of consumption, whose prices had been driven upward 
in the days when the debased testoons formed the sole 
visible currency of England. The advantage to the nation 
which really ensued was that foreign commerce' was more 
easily conducted, and that internal payments grew once 
more fixed and honest. The whole of the inhabitants of 
the realm were no longer forced to spend their time in the 
degrading employment of trying to put off their basest pieces 
on each other. Commerce and trade adjusted themselves, 
and the only permanent sufferers were the more unskilled 
labourers, whose wages had not risen commensurately to 
the general increase in the price of articles of consumption, 
and the landholders who depended on old fixed customary 
rents. For rents in the early years of Elizabeth had hardly 
risen appreciably above their rate in the early years of her 
father. Hence, the main result of the great debasement of 
1543-51 may be said to have been the handicapping of the 
agricultural classes of England, both great folks and small ; 
while the manufacturing and trading classes came out of 
the troublous times little injured, and therefore proportion- 
ately more important in the national strength than they 
had ever been before. 

So by 1561 the last of the debased Tudor money disappeared 
from view. The small amount of it which escaped recoinage 
survives only in the cabinets of museums and collectors. It 
is deplorable-looking stuff — its colour varies from pale copper, 
through dull leaden shades to rusty red. The surface has 
often flaked off in parts, when the component metals seem 
to have been roughly mixed. But horrid as is its appearance, 
it is not much more repulsive than Mr. Austin Chamberlain's 



202 THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 

great coinage of 1920-21. In the earliest issue of this stuff 
there was some alloy — bad nickel, it is said, from old military 
stores — which turned brown, green or orange in spots — pro- 
ducing a fine " ring-streaked and speckled " effect. Occa- 
sionally the white surface of a florin has turned to various 
shades of light brown, so that the coin might be mistaken 
for a penny. The later emissions of 1921 are not so much 
spotted as uniformly pale lemon yellow, but have an unplea- 
sant way of shedding some of their surface — we have seen 
specimens in which one of the shields on the reverse of a 
florin, the date, or part of the king's head, have come off, 
leaving a shallow pit behind. It is sad to reflect that the 
issue of this stuff had no justification whatever. When the 
Coinage Bill of 1920 was passed in a panic, silver stood at 88 
pence per ounce. It only remained at that prohibitive price 
for a few weeks, and has now for two years stood close in the 
neighbourhood of 35 pence per ounce. The old standard of 
purity might have been preserved without any loss to the 
revenue — indeed bullion purchased at 35s. and coined at the 
pre-war rate would give a profit of over 40 per cent, to the 
Crown. Let us hope that some spiritual successor of Queen 
Elizabeth may arise ere long, to sweep the unsightly mass 
of the money of 1920-21 into merited oblivion. 

We cannot say that its circulation has had any appreciable 
economic effect — the abandonment of bimetallism in the British 
monetary system after 1816 has made the intrinsic value of 
subsidiary silver coins of no great importance. But the 
ugliness and bad workmanship of the new debased coinage 
are a public scandal. And we should not like to say that 
its issue has not had some bad moral effect also. The pieces 
are obviously base tokens, not good silver, and there is a 
temptation to throw away recklessly stuff that looks like 
the trash that it is. We have seen it stated that Charles 
James Fox, in his gambling fits, was a much more reckless 
punter with club-tokens of ivory or metal, than when he was 
fingering golden guineas of pleasant hue and convincing weight. 
We fancy that this is a common human failing — one is extra- 
vagant with currency that looks worthless. And wastefulness 
is of all things the most besetting sin of 1922 — not only with 



THE TUDORS AND THE CURRENCY 203 

governments and profiteers, but with the man in the street. 
Wherefore let the coinage of these last two deplorable years 
be withdrawn as soon as possible, to prevent us from flinging 
it away in an instinctive desire to rid ourselves of such repulsive 
tokens. 



THE MODERN HISTORIAN AND HIS 
DIFFICULTIES 

There are two common mental attitudes which the writer 
and teacher of history meets in his mingling with the world. 
In their extreme forms they fill him with about the same 
measure of humorous despair. 

The first is that of the ordinary practical man, who has 
run against some topic in which history is involved — probably 
a political problem of to-day : Why is Danzig a German and 
not a Polish town ? Why does Corsica belong to France 
and Sardinia to Italy ? — or some such other anomaly. He 
comes to his friend the historian to ask him to solve the 
difficulty in two minutes. He is vaguely under the impression 
that there must exist somewhere (or at least, that there ought 
to exist somewhere) a general repertory of historical infor- 
mation, which will answer his query in three pages — perhaps 
even in three lines. His point of view is that history is a 
bundle of facts which can be packed into an encyclopaedia, 
and that every one can discover what he wants to know by 
turning up the right word in some universal dictionary. This 
is a pleasant and confiding attitude of mind, which assumes 
that all facts are ascertainable, and that they have only 
to be caught and bottled by competent historical experts 
for the benefit of the general public. It comes with a shock 
to this sort of inquirer to be told that the short question that 
he has asked has no universally accepted answer. He makes 
some simple inquiry such as " What was the effect of the rise 
of Christianity on the Roman Empire ? " or " What was the 
origin of the English Parliament ? " And the historian tells 
him in reply that he cannot give him any answer which is 
universally accepted, but can only present him with a series 
of doubts, or a number of rival hypotheses, each supported 

204 



TRIALS OF THE HISTORIAN 205 

by a plausible array of arguments. Probably the historian 
will try to persuade his friend to read half a dozen controversial 
volumes, after which he will have some notion of the meaning 
of the question that he has asked. The practical man of 
the world will most certainly refuse to take this trouble, and 
will go away with a poor opinion of historians, as men destitute 
of certainty, and unable even to agree among themselves. 
He would like to regard history as a string of facts, and can- 
not see why the deductions from these facts should vary 
according to the temperament and point of view of the writer 
who manipulates them. Historical facts, however, cannot 
be boiled down into a syrup equally grateful and satisfactory 
to all consumers. The decoction which one man will find to 
be exactly the nourishment required for the maintenance of 
his spiritual and political equilibrium, will be declared by 
another man to be rank poison. The historian must be 
prepared to find himself denounced from one side or the other 
as a purveyor of mischievous mental provender — perhaps 
he may achieve the honour of being equally blamed from 
both sides, because he has struck some middle line of thought 
acceptable to neither. It is almost inconceivable that any 
history of the Protestant Reformation, or the French Revolu- 
tion, or the Modern German Empire should fail to irritate 
and anger half the readers before whom it is placed. If 
such a book could possibly be written, inoffensive to all parties, 
it could only be written by shirking the moral problems 
involved, and reserving the author's comment on them — 
indeed, it would tend to be an arid waste of hard facts, with 
no guidance given for the comprehension of their meaning. 

History, in short, is not what the " practical man " would 
like to find, a record of names, dates, and events ; it is the 
interpretation of these things from the point of view of the 
historian. And since the political, moral, and national stand- 
points of historians always have differed, and will always 
continue to differ, it is impossible to produce " standard 
histories," as they have been called, on any period, topic, 
institution, or individual which will satisfy all readers — 
unless, indeed, the subject-matter has become so remote, 
and so entirely out of touch with modern problems, that 



206 TRIALS OF THE HISTORIAN 

it has ceased to provoke any division of opinion. One may 
perhaps construct a standard history of the ancient Egypt of 
the Pharaohs, or of Roman military tactics, or of mediaeval 
witchcraft, or of Alexander the Great. But can anyone 
conceive a standard history of the Jews or the Jesuits, of 
the Balkan Peninsula in the Middle Ages, or of Napoleon 
or Bismarck, which should be equally acceptable to a Jew, 
a Roman Catholic, a Protestant, a Greek, a Serb, a Bulgarian, 
a Turk, a Frenchman, and a German ? A celebrated historian 
once declared that " history is only ancient politics " ; and 
there is so much truth in the statement that I am sometimes 
inclined to think that as politics cannot exist without contro- 
versy, so history cannot exist without it either. Or at least 
we may say that if there is any large section of history on 
which no controversy ever takes place, then that must be a 
dead and not a live section of history. 

The "man in the street" comes to us with a historical 
query : it is unfortunate, but only too often we must give 
him, not the certain and definite answer that he is expecting, 
but a thesis or a piece of propaganda which may honestly 
set out our own views of the truth, but which we acknowledge 
that other people may regard as inaccurate, false, and mis- 
chievous. For history is not an objective thing, a list of 
events ; it is the historian's way of envisaging and correlating 
these events. And two historians of different politics or 
nationality may string the events together in very various 
patterns and produce two pieces of work which the unlearned 
can hardly perceive to be constructed out of the same materials. 
Who, on a first reading, would guess that Thiers' and Lanfrey's 
accounts of the career of Napoleon were constructed from the 
same set of original documents ? 

We must tell the " man in the street," therefore, that 
history is a way of looking at facts ; that the way depends 
on the bias of the individual historian ; that, in order to 
arrive at an opinion of his own on any problem, he ought in 
fairness, and in reverence for truth, to read the works of 
controversialists on both sides. He will reply that he has 
no time for lengthy historical studies, and will probably 
ask for the name of the author who sets forth best the views 



TRIALS OF THE HISTORIAN 207 

of the party, nation, or religious sect to which he himself 
belongs. And so history -writing has become, much though 
we may regret it, the most important line of political, national, 
or religious propaganda. 

So much for the dealings of the writer of history with the 
common practical layman. There is, however, another 
mental attitude, of a very different sort, against which he 
will certainly run during the course of his work. And it 
will cause him an even greater trouble than the complaints 
of the disappointed and disillusioned layman. This is the 
mentality of the historical specialist, the man who has made 
some corner of history his own, who thinks that he has 
acquired a certain monopoly in it, and that he possesses 
" patent rights," with which no other author must meddle, 
over this particular century, or institution, or great individual. 
In history, as in every other science, the jealous and narrow- 
minded specialist is a common type. The difficulty of dealing 
with this person is that he is fully convinced that the whole 
course of world-history turns round his own particular little 
preserve. To him all Roman history may be a story which 
mainly hinges on the Proconsulare Imperium, or all English 
history may depend on the growth of the Manor, or all 
German history on the statutes of the Hanseatic League. 
I once knew a learned ecclesiastical historian who made 
the obscure tribe of Jerahmeel, mentioned twice in the Old 
Testament, the originators of all Jewish nationality. He 
did not make converts, but he conducted much controversy, 
and thought very poorly of all those who rejected his theory. 

The professional historical specialist is too often like the 
man in the proverb, who cannot see the wood because all 
his attention is concentrated on his own particular tree. 
If you trust him with the compiling of a general history, 
you will find that every other period and event has assumed 
an ancillary position around the ten or twenty years in which 
he himself is interested. As to histories written by other 
people, he will assure the world in perfect honesty that they 
are all wrong in perspective, because they do not show that 
the period or personage of his predilection forms the central 
point round which all the rest of history revolves. And 



208 TRIALS OF THE HISTORIAN 

every one else who ventures to touch on his own pet subject 
will undoubtedly appear to him an irreverent intruder into a 
region reserved for himself. No other historian can possibly 
get the right view of that subject — be it the Athenian Arehon- 
ship, or the Council of Trent, or the character of Stephen 
Dushan — because the rash adventurer comes to conclusions 
of his own, which differ in greater or less detail from the 
orthodox creed formulated by the one competent and omnis- 
cient authority. 

In short, after coming into collision with the true specialist, 
the workaday historian goes away feeling almost as depressed, 
and doubtful of his own right to exist, as he was when the 
" common practical man " dismissed him as useless and 
incompetent. 

Need he, therefore, despair ? Must he make up his mind 
that history should mean either on the one hand the collection 
of dry annals without a connecting link of philosophic thought, 
or on the other a series of minute monographs, in which each 
researcher remains inside his own little fence, resents the 
appearance of any other researcher within it, and cares very 
little for all the rest of history which lies outside his sacred 
paddock ? 

It would be deplorable if any student came to this con- 
clusion. As historical research stands to-day, there is a most 
honourable place waiting for the codifier and the philosopher. 
Indeed, they were never so much wanted as at the present 
moment. The characteristic of historical study during the 
last thirty years, in every country of Europe, is that there 
has been a very rapid and copious collection of new facts 
from unprinted sources and archaeological discovery, but 
that the arrangement of these facts in orderly, logical, and 
philosophic symmetry has been sadly neglected. The day 
of great histories seems almost over — monographs, biographies, 
economic or constitutional studies, diplomatic papers or 
statistical tables, or records of excavations and inscriptions, 
rain in upon us in profusion. But it seems to be no man's 
business to arrange this mass of new material in perspective, 
or to determine the relative importance of each item — or 
at least, no competent man's business. For unfortunately 



TRIALS OF THE HISTORIAN 209 

there is a class of people who " rush in where angels fear 
to tread," and try to generalize on history without having 
any detailed knowledge of it. We all have met the man who 
after reading half a dozen popular manuals is prepared to 
lay down the scheme of the whole universe, ignoring all diffi- 
culties because he does not know of their existence. This 
is the type which the French call the " vulgarisateur," the 
man who offers to make history, science, or art easily accessible 
to the multitude, by leaving out all their problems and uncer- 
tainties. It was a common genus enough in the eighteenth 
century, commoner in the nineteenth, but appears to have 
reached its extreme development in the twentieth, when liter- 
ary men of all calibres seem inclined to generalize on the history 
of England, France, or the whole Universe, merely on the justi- 
fication of a fluent pen. To attack such subjects with no 
wide knowledge of languages, no power or leisure to read 
original authorities, no foundation of detailed studies, can 
only result in producing " the second-rate at second-hand." 

It is, I think, the existence of the vulgarisateur, and the 
fear of being taken for one of that dreadful class, which deters 
many competent historians at present from writing large- 
scale histories in the old style. They feel a real horror of the 
possibility that when they are trying to follow in the steps 
of Gibbon or Ranke, they may be accused of being the spiritual 
comrades of the universal sciolist. 

Yet there never was a time when the historical codifier and 
philosopher was so much wanted. The greater the mass of 
undigested and chaotic facts that is being thrown up by the 
excavators in the field of historic research, the greater is the 
need for the patient man who will be content to spend long 
years in sifting out the heap of material, of all shapes and 
values, in order to collect all the more important fragments. 
Thus only can the fabric of history be rebuilt from year to 
year, each new discovery being fitted into the ever-changing 
mosaic. 

The modern student, as Lord Acton once remarked, is in 
considerable danger of being overwhelmed by the vast bulk of 
new and unsorted historical material which is shot in upon him 
by the researcher. This, indeed, happened to that admirable 

u.c.d. p 



210 TRIALS OF THE HISTORIAN 

man himself ; for while trying to read every volume that 
appeared in every language on the subject which he had 
chosen for his magnum opus — the evolution of the idea of 
Liberty — he forgot his advancing years, and was surprised 
by death while he was still wrestling with new books, before 
he had written even one volume as the result of his many 
decades of study. Not even the youngest of us can hope 
to be one day omniscient, — and then to start writing. The 
only practical ambition is to collate and set forth the sum 
of knowledge as it exists in one's own day. The discoveries 
of the future will be for the next generation to work upon. 
All that the writer of to-day can hope to accomplish, is to 
bring history up to date, so far as in him lies, by the honest 
and laborious piecing together of all the new information 
available. It will not be an easy task ; some of the new 
matter will have to be read only to be rejected as worthless 
or unimportant, more of it will have to be subjected to ruthless 
criticism. But there will be a large residuum of new facts 
which must be worked into the general fabric of history. 
It will be no dishonour to the great historians of older days 
if their books have, with all reverence, to be laid aside, or 
sent up to the more inaccessible shelves of our library. It 
would be absurd to accept in 1921 a book which was an 
admirable summary of its topic in 1861. This is as true in 
History as in Medicine or Chemistry : we are dealing with 
a progressive science, not with an infallible Bible. 

It is, no doubt, a disheartening thought to remember that 
twenty or thirty years hence — perhaps even at an earlier date 
— our own books on history must go to the same limbo of 
forgotten things as the books of our revered predecessors. 
There is no finality in History, any more than there is in 
Natural Science. A new recension of knowledge is required 
by the new generation ; and our works, which we cherished 
so much, will disappear to the top shelf of the Public Library 
— if not to the cellar. We must think ourselves happy if 
they appear to our grandchildren rather as glimpses of the 
obvious than as expositions of exploded heresies. Never- 
theless, we claim that we have not been without our use : 
every generation must codify and collate its own stock of 



TRIALS OF THE HISTORIAN 211 

knowledge ; and the codifiers, if their work has been honest, 
have served well the men of their own time. To the man 
of the future they can only say Morituri te salutamus — our 
work must perish ; but it had to be done. 



XI 
THE EARTHLY PARADISE 

It is a noteworthy fact that in almost all the religions of the 
ancient world, the human soul, though it may he defined as 
immortal and disembodied, seldom entirely quits this earth. 
Before the birth of Geography, men imagined the world to be 
large enough to contain, not only the land of the living, but 
also the land of the dead, and even the habitations of the gods 
themselves. The Greek divinities dwelt on an Olympus which 
was originally earthly and local ; so did the Indian gods on 
their Mount Meru ; so, too, the deities of the North abode in 
an Asgard, which men conceived as a fixed point exactly in 
the middle of the face of the earth. And if a terrestrial 
dwelling could be found for the gods, much more could a 
habitation be discovered for the disembodied spirits of men. 
Soul-lands, then, whether figured as under-worlds or Isles of 
the Blessed (to use familiar names), are of almost universal 
acceptance. With the former class we are not here concerned ; 
but to the latter, when a place on the surface of the earth is 
assigned to them, we may apply the name " Earthly Paradise." 
These, then, form one branch of our subject ; along with them 
must be ranged the Christian Paradise, which was identified 
with the Biblical Eden — and also the deathless lands, not 
destined for souls, but for living men, with which we some- 
times meet in mediaeval legends. 

The regions which belong to the first of these classes are 
invariably placed in the West. Of this fact the most plausible 
explanation is, that all the ancient nations, when imagining 
the journey of the departed soul, had in their minds the 
journey of the sun, the one god who dies daily, yet who has 
not really perished, but is only withdrawn from human sight. 
Nearly every tribe had some knowledge of a sea towards the 
West, with whose limits they were, in the early part of their 

212 



THE EARTHLY PARADISE 213 

history, quite unacquainted. Accordingly the soul-land was 
usually conceived as lying across the unexplored Western 
waters. The Egyptian abode of the dead was an exception to 
this rule, for not sea but desert forms the impassable western 
boundary of the Nile Valley. But none the less the Egyptian 
soul-land was placed in the West, though the spirit of the 
departed had to cross the desert, the " dark land of Apap," 
before arriving at the home of Osiris, the hidden sun. 

There are two ways in which the setting of the sun into the 
west may strike the mind of the beholder. On the one hand, 
the sight of the end of a fine summer day, when the whole 
horizon is a sheet of vivid colour and the sea is divided by a 
golden path, calls up ideas of a land of glory where the sun-god 
rests after the labours of the day. On the other hand, after a 
day of mist and tempest, when the sun has seemed to wrestle 
with the black clouds, and finally sinks, swallowed up by them, 
into a dark and stormy sea, the sight of his end suggests only 
gloomy thoughts. So we get the double idea of the West, — as 
the bright Elysian plain or the garden of the Hesperides ; and, 
on the other hand, as the dim shadowy land where the disem- 
bodied souls spend an aimless and hopeless existence. 

Both these ideas appear in the Homeric poems. Although 
in the Iliad the " dark home of Hades " is certainly below 
the earth, yet in the Odyssey when Ulysses visits the shades, he 
does not descend, but meets them on the misty shore of the 
land of the dead. Its situation, in accordance with all Aryan 
ideas, is in the West, or perhaps North-west. Although in the 
Homeric poems the gloomy view of the after-life — which allots 
a colourless and unhappy existence to the souls of the greatest 
heroes, Achilles, Ajax, and their fellows, as much as to the souls 
of the common herd — is generally found, yet the more cheerful 
aspect of the West is shown in at least one passage, where 
Proteus prophesies to Menelaus that his last end will be to come 
to " the Elysian plain and the ends of the earth, where abides 
the fair-haired Rhadamanthus ; where life is easy for mortals ; 
where is no snow nor storm nor rain, but always the ocean sends 
up the cooling breath of the west wind," — a description well 
known as copied by Lucretius and Tennyson. 

In Hesiod we first find this Western land mentioned by the 



214 THE EARTHLY PARADISE 

name which afterwards became its proper title, Maxdgcov vtfooi. 
Speaking of the heroes of the Theban and Trojan wars, he 
makes Zeus bear them away after death, " to have their life 
and their abode apart from men, so that they dwell un- 
disturbed in the Islands of the Blessed, by the deep-flowing 
ocean, where the fruitful earth brings forth her harvests 
thrice a year." 

A similar picture is found in the Olympian Odes of Pindar, 
who speaks of the Island of the Blessed, round which the 
ocean breezes blow — where earth and water alike blaze with 
golden flowers, and the just dwell wreathed with garlands 
beneath the gentle sway of Rhadamanthus. 

After Pindar it is unnecessary to mention the numerous 
allusions to this Western land which are found in the Greek 
poets. It seems, however, to be different from Leuk6, which 
would appear to have been a sort of private Earthly Paradise 
for the hero Achilles. Before the extent of the Euxine was 
known, he was supposed to inhabit an island in its extreme 
west, where he was united to Helen, and was accustomed to 
drive his chariot along the smooth promontory called Achilleos 
Dromos. 

When the Euxine was explored, the idea vanished, or rather 
shrank into the worship of Achilles as ruler of the sea at the 
colony of Olbia, the Greek colony nearest to the legendary 
position of Leuke. 

After a time there came the materializing age of ancient 
history — that in which all the old legendary spots were fitted 
with places in the real lands of the Western Mediterranean, 
when Phseacia became Corcyra, and Sicily the dwelling of the 
Cyclops. At this time the Isles of the Blessed were placed 
outside the Straits of Gibraltar. But some centuries later, 
about 100 B.C., actual islands of pleasant aspect were dis- 
covered in that direction. Hence these, which we now call the 
Cape de Verde Islands, got the name of Fortunatse Insulse : 
and though no one asserted that they were inhabited by the 
souls of the just, yet the old wonders of the isles of the blessed 
were related of them ; and we read of their perpetual spring, 
and the three harvests a year which they produced. The 
accounts of these islands in sober geographers, which survived 



THE EARTHLY PARADISE 215 

into the middle ages, were certainly one of the reasons which 
induced the exploration of the Western sea. 

Unlike the Greeks, the Romans succeeded to the rule of a 
world which had been explored ; and except in a few allusions in 
the poets and in Pliny, manifestly borrowed from the Greek, 
we do not find the islands of the blessed in their old sense 
mentioned till a very late date. Strange to say, however, 
among the very last of the Roman authors, as if we were coming 
on the shadow which the approaching middle ages cast before 
them, we find the old Western spirit-land of the Odyssey 
reappearing. In Claudian we meet with the following passage : 
" There is a land, where the farthest end of Gaul stretches out 
into the ocean, where Ulysses is said to have invoked the silent 
folk with libations of blood. Here, even now, the pitiful wailing 
of the souls is heard as they flit past, and the peasants see pale 
shapes, the forms of the dead, taking their way from earth." 

This allusion is amplified by the longer passage on the same 
subject found in the Byzantine writer Procopius, who flour- 
ished under Justinian in the sixth century : — 

" Opposite the north-western coast of Gaul," he writes, " there is a 
large island called Brittia ; it is divided into two parts by a wall stretch- 
ing north and south. East of the wall is a pleasant land which is 
occupied by the Britons, Angles, and Frisians. What the land to the 
west is like, no one knows, for its air is deadly to breathe, and any one 
who passes the wall instantly expires. Now on the extreme north- 
west coast of Gaul," he continues, " there dwell certain fishermen, 
subject to the Franks, but excused from all tribute on account of the 
strange duty which they perform. 

" Every night one of these fishermen, in rotation, is roused from sleep 
by a gentle tapping at his door, and a low voice calls him to come down 
to the beach. There lie dark vessels, to all appearance empty, but 
deep in the water, as if weighed down by a heavy burden. Pushing 
off, the fishermen arrive at the coast of Brittia in one night, though it 
is on ordinary occasions six days' journey from Gaul. During the 
voyage they hear the sound of voices in the boat, but no intelligible 
words, only a subdued whispering. Arrived at the strange coast, they 
hear the names called over, and different voices answering to them, 
while they feel the boat gradually growing lighter ; at last the roll-call 
ceases, and they are wafted back to their country with the same 
miraculous speed with which they had left." 

Such is the last trace of the old soul-land which we meet in 



216 THE EARTHLY PARADISE 

classical literature. In the shrinkage of the known world 
which followed the fall of the Western empire it has got localized 
in Britain — and apparently in Wales or Cornwall ! 

In its next appearance the Earthly Paradise is entirely 
changed, and in Christian hands has ceased to be the habita- 
tion of departed spirits, and has shifted altogether its position 
on the earth. So greatly is its character altered, that many 
authorities would derive the mediaeval legends dealing with it, 
not from any pagan source, but entirely from the literal 
interpretations of the Bible which obtained in the middle ages. 
It hardly seems to be due to the principle enunciated at the 
beginning ; and only in its wider developments is it influenced 
by the old Greek or Keltic beliefs. The true and orthodox 
terrestrial Paradise of the middle ages lay, not across the 
mysterious Western ocean, but in the equally mysterious lands 
of the sun-rising. It was universally identified with the 
Garden of Eden, in which Adam and Eve had been placed ; 
and it was therefore impossible to seek it in any other quarter 
than the East. Now in mediaeval times the limits of the known 
world were shrunken far within the boundaries known to the 
later Roman geographers, Ptolemy, Strabo, and then fellows. 
In the twelfth or thirteenth century the Western world knew 
almost exactly as much, or rather as little, of Asia as Herodotus 
had known 1,600 years before. The very stories which the 
father of history related of Indians and gold-producing ants, of 
griffins and Arimaspi, had returned to their old localities in 
Central Asia, though in Roman days they had for some time 
continually receded further and further into the unknown 
North-east. Now again, as in the fifth century before Christ, 
men believed that beyond an India of no great extent, there 
lay no more inhabited lands, but only desert and sea, But 
unlike the ancients, the mediaevals placed in the furthest part 
of this region the Earthly Paradise, either as an oasis in an 
expanse of rocks and sands, or as an island in an unnavigable 
ocean. Sometimes we read of it as inaccessible by reason of 
lands of mist and darkness, or insurmountable precipices ; 
sometimes it is tempestuous seas or rivers which bar the way. 
But beyond them, if a man could but penetrate, he would find 
the Eden where our first father had dwelt, where rise the four 



THE EARTHLY PARADISE 217 

mysterious rivers, and where grows every tree that is pleasant 
to the sight or good for food. 

" There," says Neckam, " is a beautiful land where whole tracts are 
overgrown with the noble vine ; there are clear springs, and groves 
watered with pleasant streams. Glorious is the fruit which enriches 
its gardens, and no sterile tree can grow in its soil. Never do storms 
come near it, nor violent winds, but there always blows a gentle breeze. 
Thither never came the waters of the all-destroying Flood." 

" In that Paradise," says in a more prosaic strain the author of the 
Polychronicon, "is everything that is congruent to life. It hath 
salubrity and wholesomeness, for it enjoyeth an equal temperance, 
feeling neither coldness nor heat, insomuch that nothing that has life 
may in any wise die within it. In testimony whereof, Enoch and 
Elias wait yet therein, having the bodies with which they left this life 
still uncorrupt. Moreover, that place has all pleasantness, for it is the 
store-house of all that is fair, where no tree ever loseth its leaves, and 
no flower withereth. There is mirth and sweetness from the fruit and 
trees that grow there, for every tree that is therein is sweet to eat and 
fair to see. And there is security, for no harm may come near it, nor 
even did the water of the great Flood come nigh." 

Thus far all the authorities coincide ; but there were certain 
points in the earthly Paradise which gave rise to dire contro- 
versies. Various authors give various situations for it. In some 
it is a great island lying south and east of " Inde the Great," 
apparently occupying the place of Ceylon. Thus it appears in 
the " Hereford Mappa Mundi " as a circular island enclosed 
by a wall, lying just opposite to the mouth of the Ganges. 
But a little later, when Ceylon was more or less known, it 
receded to a continental position somewhere in China. Still 
later, when thirteenth-century Europe had heard of Cathay 
and the Great Khan, the insular theory was revived ; and as 
lying south of China and east of India, we must identify the 
final position of Eden with Sumatra, Java, or some of the 
islands in that part of the world. 

Here lay Paradise in the early fifteenth century, and from 
this spot it vanished into nothingness, when in the end of that 
century the voyages of the Portuguese and Spaniards revealed 
both East and West, and banished from the world numbers of 
the old myths which had survived for so many ages. Vasco de 
Gama, Columbus and Magellan destroyed not only the impass- 



218 THE EARTHLY PARADISE 

ability of the Cape of Storms, the unlimited breadth of the 
Atlantic, and the unorthodoxy of a belief in the antipodes, but 
also the beautiful old idea of the Earthly Paradise. Men 
might still sail to seek Ophir, or the North-west Passage, or 
El Dorado, but no room was left on earth for the terrestrial 
Eden. If ever we find it mentioned in books of the sixteenth 
century, it is because an author is discussing where was the 
Paradise of Genesis, not where is the beautiful land in which 
the fourteenth century believed. 

In the vague and misty ideas which were entertained in the 
middle ages about Eastern geography, a little disagreement 
about the exact position of Paradise was not likely to cause 
very hot disputes. But it was otherwise concerning the shape 
of that locality : here the wise geographers and chroniclers 
had their own inner consciousness to draw on, and three sets of 
views were put forth, whose supporters argued angrily against 
each other's suppositions. Now no one doubted that the 
terrestrial Paradise was not touched by the Flood (for, said 
they, if it had been, we should have been told of it), and that it 
was quite or almost inaccessible to man. The oldest way of 
explaining these two facts was by making Paradise a pillar- 
shaped mountain, with a table-land on its summit, but with 
steep and inaccessible sides. So great was its height, that we 
are assured that it all but touched the orbit of the moon. 
This being the case, we can easily understand that it was 
undisturbed by the Flood ; for although the waters rose forty 
fathoms above the highest hills, the summit of the mountain of 
Paradise was forty fathoms above the highest limit of the 
Deluge. Adding these eighty fathoms to the highest mountain 
known to a twelfth-century chronicler, we can obtain an idea 
of the distance from the earth at which the moon was supposed 
to revolve, for Paradise very nearly touches the moon's orbit. 
Allowing 20,000 feet altogether as a fair margin, we cannot but 
think that the twelfth century was a little weak in its as- 
tronomy ; indeed we may be deeply thankful that its calcula- 
tions are not exactly true — for who can tell what dreadful 
results might not follow if the moon came into collision with 
Mount Everest, or any other elevation rising a little above the 
height which was allowed to Paradise ? 



THE EARTHLY PARADISE 219 

The same school of geographers who held this view on the 
moon-orbit, maintained that the world was not a globe, but a 
mass of land, of various heights in different places, which rests 
upon the face of a limitless ocean. They argued that Scripture 
speaks of " the waters under the earth," and that this would be 
an incorrect description if the ocean merely formed part of the 
surface of a terrestrial globe. The earth must, therefore, be a 
body placed upon the level face of the circumfluent ocean. 
Moreover, so small did they imagine the world to be, that they 
objected to the globe-theory that the mountains of the world, 
and more especially the mountain of Paradise, would prevent 
the earth from being a perfect figure. So Neckam writes : — 

" Ausi sunt veteres terram censere rotundam, 
Quamvis emineat montibus ilia suis. 
Quamvis deliciis ornatus apex Paradisi 
Lunarem tangit vertice psene globum." 

It was the same school who deduced from Ezekiel v. 5 the fact 
that a circle drawn from the centre of Jerusalem, with the 
radius to the extreme west of Spain, would exactly embrace 
the whole land of the world ; for was it not written, " This is 
Jerusalem : I have set it in the midst of the nations round 
about " ; and " God is King of old, working salvation in the 
middle of the earth " ? So map-making was simplified or 
complicated (opinions may differ on the subject) by making all 
the earth centre round Judea, to the sad distortion of out- 
lying peninsulas like Norway or India. 

The second school of geographers were prepared to admit 
that the world was round, and maintained that Paradise was 
no lofty mountain, but a spacious country, " not less in size 
than Egypt or India " ; for, said they, if Adam had not sinned 
it would have had to contain the whole human race, and must 
therefore be of no mean size. Again, the idea that Paradise 
was the highest point of earth was displeasing to them. 

"We must not think," says Higden, "as do some men of small 
intellect and little experience, that Paradise is far away from all habit- 
able lands, and reaches up to the orbit of the moon — for neither reason 
nor nature allows this belief. Neither air nor water could support the 
weight of such a burden. Moreover, the element of fire, as all wise 



220 THE EARTHLY PARADISE 

men agree, fills a space between our lower air and the orbit of the 
moon. The summit, then, of Paradise would be in the region of fire, 
where no vegetable can possibly exist, nor human life. How, then, 
can Adam or the tree of life have been there ? And again, if the place 
were so high, its summit would continually be getting between us and 
the moon, and causing eclipses, especially in Eastern lands. No one, 
however, has ever seen or heard of such an eclipse. Besides this, four 
rivers rise in Paradise, which flow through well-known countries ; 
therefore it must be contiguous to our habitable world, or the rivers 
could never reach us. The rational view of Paradise is, that it is a 
large fair region in the extreme East, only separated from the homes of 
men by that fiery wall, the sword of the cherubim, of which we read in 
Genesis." 

So much for the views of home-staying sages on the terres- 
trial Eden. Let us now turn to the testimony of a traveller. 
Inventive as was the unscrupulous author of Sir John Mande- 
ville's Travels — who veiled his real identity under the name of 
that apocryphal knight — there seems no reason to doubt that 
he had some personal acquaintance with the East. Thus he 
attained some knowledge both of India and of Cathay, and 
therefore localized it in neither, but to the south-east, " hard by 
the land of Prester John." He is gracious enough to confess that 
he never went there himself, both because of the distance and of 
his own unworthiness, but gives us some accounts drawn from 
conversations with those who had striven to approach it : — 

" Paradys," he had learnt, "is enclosed all about with a wall, of 
which men know not the matter. For it is covered all over with mosse 
as it seemeth, and is not of the natur of stone. And that wall stretcheth 
from the south to the north, and hath but one entry, that is closed with 
fire burning, so that men may not enter. And ye should understand 
that no man may by any means approach to that Paradys. For by 
land no man may go for the wild beasts that are in the deserts, and for 
the high mountains and huge rocks, and for the dark places that be 
there right many. And by the rivers may no man go, for that the 
water runneth rudely and sharpely, because that it cometh down 
outrageously from the high places above. And it runneth in so great 
waves that no ship may not row nor sail against it ; and the water 
roareth so, and maketh so huge noise and so great tempest, that no 
man may hear other in the ship, though he cry with all the might he 
have, in the highest voice that he may. Many great lords have essayed 
with great will many times for to pass by that river toward Paradys, 
with full great companies ; but they might not speed in their voyage : 



THE EARTHLY PARADISE 221 

and many died for weariness of rowing against the strong waves ; and 
many became blind, and many deaf, for the dashing and noise of the 
water ; and some were perished and lost within the waves, — so that 
no mortalle man may approach to that place without special grace of 
God : therefore of Paradys can I say you no more." 

Among these great lords whom the pseudo-Mandeville 
mentions, was, according to Paludanus, no less a person than 
Alexander the Great himself. Indeed we are told that his 
Eastern conquests were especially undertaken for the purpose 
of attaining to the Earthly Paradise. When he had reached 
India, and was nearing his goal, some of his soldiers captured a 
venerable old man in a ravine, and were about to conduct him 
to their king, when he said, " Go and announce to Alexander 
that it is in vain that he seeks Paradise ; all his efforts will be 
fruitless, for the way of Paradise is humility, a way of which 
he knows nothing." And in truth Alexander could pursue his 
purpose no longer from that day, because of the mutiny of his 
soldiers, who would go no further from their native land. 

We have found only one account of a man who was actually 
asserted to have entered the terrestrial Paradise. This is the 
tale of the Norwegian Eirek. 1 This Saga of Eirek, however, 
hardly purports to be an actual itinerary, and was allowed 
even in the middle ages to be more of a religious novel than 
a sober narrative. Eirek, we are told, made a vow to find the 
Earthly Paradise, and having obtained information as to its 
locality from the Byzantine Emperor, diligently sought for it 
to the east of India. At last, after passing through a gloomy 
forest, he came upon a narrow strait separating him from a 
very beautiful land. From his instructions he recognized that 
these were Paradise and the river Pison, and determined to 
cross the water, though the only mode of access to the distant 
shore was a narrow stone bridge, which was completely blocked 
up by a dragon of portentous size. The Norseman drew his 
sword and deliberately walked into the monster's mouth, 
which, to his surprise, did not close on him, but vanished. 
Thus he passed without obstacle to the further shore, where 
he found the usual characteristics of the Earthly Paradise — 

1 See Baring-Gould's Curious Myths of the Middle Ages. 



222 THE EARTHLY PARADISE 

undying flowers, marvellous fruits, clear rivulets, but no 
living being. 

At last he came upon a sort of tower suspended in mid-air, to 
which access could be had by climbing a slender ladder. On 
ascending to this tower Eirek found a dinner thoughtfully pre- 
pared for him in one of its chambers, of which he partook, and 
soon fell asleep. In his sleep he saw in a vision his guardian 
angel, who promised him a safe return to Norway, but added 
that, at the end of ten years, he would be carried away from 
the earth never to return again. Eirek retraced his steps over 
the bridge, and through the simulacrum of the dragon, which 
was apparently nothing more than a show to appal the faint- 
hearted. After long travelling he came back to his native 
town of Drontheim, and told his story, to the great edification 
of all true Christian folk. Ten years after, as he went to 
prayer one morning, he was caught up and carried away by 
God's Spirit, and was never again seen of men. 

The saga of Eirek is evidently in great part allegorical : we 
seem to recognize the narrow strait of death which separates 
the Christian pilgrim from Paradise ; and in the dragon, death 
itself, terrible to the coward, but which, when resolutely faced 
by the brave man, turns out to be an empty horror with no 
power to harm. 

There are yet two more points connected with the terrestrial 
Eden which must be mentioned before we pass on to the con- 
sideration of the Western deathless land, in which there was also 
belief in mediaeval times. Firstly, as to the rivers of Paradise 
mentioned in Genesis, the geographers universally identified 
the Pison with the Ganges, and the Gihon with the Nile ; but 
how to bring the sources of these two rivers into juxtaposition 
with those of the Tigris and Euphrates was indeed a hard task. 
Those who maintained that Paradise was an island, generally 
explained the matter by alleging, that although the Ganges 
might seem to rise in North India, the Tigris in Armenia, and 
so on, yet really the first appearances of these rivers were not 
their sources. The real sources were in Paradise, from whence 
the water was conveyed in a mysterious kind of submarine 
and subterranean canal to the places where the rivers appar- 
ently take their rise. 



THE EARTHLY PARADISE 223 

Those who made Paradise continental had not quite such a 
hard task in their explanation. They made out that the 
Ganges, Euphrates, and Tigris actually flowed down from 
Paradise, over whose boundary they fell in a cataract, which 
finally divided into three streams. Moreover, they added 
that the roar of this cataract was so tremendous, that those 
who approached too near were usually rendered deaf for the 
rest of their life, and that the children of a tribe of savages who 
dwelt not far off, were even born deaf, from their ancestors 
having lived for generations near the cataract. The last 
thing which we must mention concerning the Earthly Paradise 
is, that there was a difference of opinion as to whether the 
famous Phoenix lived in Paradise, or merely close to it. The 
former view was not so generally held as the latter. It was, 
however, supported by some who brought forward the passage 
of Claudian, who speaks of the dwelling of the Phoenix as the 
" green grove surrounded by circumfluent ocean, beyond the 
Indians, close to the sunrising." This might easily be iden- 
tified with Paradise. The majority, however, placed the 
home of the Phoenix close to but not within the terrestrial 
Eden. So we read that Alexander the Great, though he could 
never reach the earthly Paradise, did come upon the Phoenix 
in the most easterly point of his expedition, within the same 
grove where were the talking trees of the sun. So, too, Neckam 
places the bird in Panchsea in India ; and in other authors it is 
found in its old Herodotean position in Arabia, where it 
appears in the " Hereford Mappa Mundi." 

So much for the Eastern Paradise, the ancient seat of our 
first parents. We must now endeavour to give some ideas of a 
more hazy and mysterious land, the Western region of unend- 
ing spring and perpetual youth, which Morris represents his 
seafarers as seeking in his poem " The Earthly Paradise." 
Although the voice of ecclesiastical tradition pronounced that 
in the East, and there alone, was the happy land to be sought, 
there was nevertheless a mass of legends which insisted on 
placing it in the West. A very large number of these stories 
are derived from Welsh or Irish sources, and it seems almost 
certain that they are not mere mediaeval inventions, but 
survivals of the old Keltic mythology. Like most other 



224 THE EARTHLY PARADISE 

nations, the Kelts had imagined for themselves a soul-land 
across the Western ocean : and when they were converted to 
Christianity, and forbidden to look either for a heaven on 
earth, or for a Paradise in the West, they did not entirely give 
up their old belief, but merely modified it to a form which did 
not clash with the new religion. The Western land might not 
be the earthly Paradise, but none the less it might exist. 
Such was the true origin of the Land of Avilion or Avalon, the 
Isle of Apples, to which King Arthur was borne away, and 
also of the long-sought Isle of St. Brandan. Moreover, the 
King Arthur of more sober history (I mean the authentic 
dux bellorum, not the legendary monarch of all Britain), is 
now asserted by many writers to have been a Keltic demi-god 
long before he became a Damnonian prince. Sad to say, the 
all-devouring Sun-myth-theory laid claim to him, as it has to 
most other heroes, and we were invited to recognize in him the 
sun sailing into the Western shades in his golden boat, or 
wrestling at his end with the dark clouds of evening. Arthur, 
then, to the votaries of this school was a god brought down by 
euhemerizing means to the form of a man, not a man raised by 
exaggerated traditions to an over-important place in history. 
Moreover, if we take this view, certain points in the Arthur of 
the romances seem well explained by it. Thus we can under- 
stand his mysterious and apparently superhuman birth, the 
strange legend which tells how he was not really King Uther's 
son, but was brought to Tintagel by the magic ship, and left on 
the shore a new-born babe in Merlin's hands. Thus we can see 
how he is claimed as brother by the Queen Morgan le Fay, who 
is certainly no mere human being. Thus it is only right that 
this mysterious sister should bear him away, after that last 
dim battle in the West, to some fair land beyond the sea, in 
the barge wherein Sir Bedivere placed him. He is no man 
merely departing " to heal him of his deadly wound," but a 
superhuman being returning to the place from which he came. 
And as Arthur is held to be no mere Damnonian hero, so 
Avilion is no mere Glastonbury, as the materializing chronicler 
would make it. It is the old Keltic soul-land beyond the 
Western ocean. We may notice, in confirmation of this, that 
the mediaeval chroniclers of Glastonbury, when they identify it 



THE EARTHLY PARADISE 225 

with Avilion, generally add that the Welsh call the place 
Inysvitrin, the Isle of Glass. Now in the Irish legends a hill or 
island of glass is invariably mentioned as one of the marvellous 
features of Fathinnis, the land of departed souls. It is notice- 
able that the Morgan le Fay, the lady of Avilion, has not from 
a goddess become an evil spirit, as did Horsel the goddess of 
the German Venusberg ; she is neither angel nor fiend, but a 
fairy, superhuman without being satanic. 

After the Arthurian legend had become popular, Avilion 
was made the resting place of other heroes. Ogier the Dane 
came thither, at the end of his life, to rest after all his toils in 
the castle of Morgan le Fay. So did the famous Paladins, and 
even, as some say, the great Kaiser Charles himself. In short, 
it became a sort of Elysian Fields for all the heroes whom the 
mediaeval mind could admire, but at the same time could not 
conceive as fulfilling the ideal of the Christian saint. The 
Christian heaven above was the fit place for the ecstatic 
adoration of holy men and martyrs, but it was not suited for 
the heroes of the romances ; for them there was imagined a 
more earthly resting-place, a fairy-land where they might for 
ever enjoy youth and quiet repose. 

After Avilion, the most famous legendary Western land was 
undoubtedly the Isle of St. Brandan. Brandan is said to 
have been an Irish monk, and abbot of Birr, at some time in 
the seventh century. He was induced to undertake his 
marvellous voyage by a monk, who told him that he had 
sailed from Ireland till he had at last come to Paradise, which 
was an island full of joy and mirth, where the earth was as 
bright as the sun, and everything was glorious, and the half- 
year he had spent there had slipped by as a few moments. On 
his return to his abbey his garments were still fragrant with 
the odours of Paradise. Excited by this story, Brandan 
embarked in a vessel with some of his monks. We are told in 
the oldest form of the legend that he sailed due east from 
Ireland ; but as this must have necessarily brought him to 
England, or some part of North-western Europe, we soon find 
his voyage transferred to the West. The marvels which he 
met were extraordinary. Among the first was the astound- 
ing spectacle of Judas Iscariot afloat upon an iceberg, who 

U.C.D. Q 



226 THE EARTHLY PARADISE 

explained to the saint that for one day in the year he was per- 
mitted to cool himself from the fires of hell, in consideration of 
a single good deed which he had performed on earth. Matthew 
Arnold has versified this episode of the Brandan legend. After 
passing through a sea filled with icebergs and vexed with 
storms, Brandan reached a more clement region, where he first 
came on an island inhabited by sheep alone, which, in conse- 
quence of the luxuriance of the herbage, grew as large as oxen. 
Soon after, the saint came to another island, where he found to 
his surprise an abbey of twenty-four monks, who informed him 
that in that isle was ever fair weather, and none of them had 
ever been sick since they came thither. Yet further on was a 
third island, where was, in the words of the legend, " a fair 
well, and a great tree full of boughs, and on every bough sat a 
fair bird, and they sat so thick on the tree that no leaf of it 
might be seen, the number of the birds being very great, and 
they sang so merrily that it was a heavenly noise to hear. 
Anon one of the birds flew from the tree to Brandan, and with 
flickering of his wings made a full merry noise, like a fiddle, 
that the saint never heard so joyful a melodie. Then did the 
holy man command the bird to tell him why they sat so thick 
upon the tree." The answer of the bird was surprising : he 
explained that he and his companions were once angels — 
namely, those of the heavenly host who in the time of Lucifer's 
rebellion refused to assist either God or His enemies. In 
punishment for this they were doing penance in the form of 
birds, but, after many years, were to be readmitted to their 
lost estate. Leaving the island of birds, the voyagers came to 
another land, " the fairest country," we are told, " that any 
man might see — which was so clear and so bright that it was 
an heavenly sight to behold ; and all the trees were charged 
with ripe fruit and herbes full of flowers, — in which land they 
walked forty days and could not see the end thereof ; there 
was alway day and never night, and the country was attem- 
perate, neither too hot nor too cold." At last, however, 
Brandan and his companions came to a broad river, on the 
banks of which stood a young man, apparently an angel, who 
told him that this stream divided the world in twain, and that 
no living man might cross it. On the further bank they could 



THE EARTHLY PARADISE 227 

see the true Paradise, but might not approach it ; wherefore 
they retraced their steps, and set sail for Ireland. They 
reached their country in safety, but were surprised to hear 
that they had been absent, not a few months, but seven long 
years. 

Such is the legend of St. Brandan, and the existence of these 
marvellous isles to which he had attained was firmly believed 
for centuries. Sometimes men declared that they were not 
far from the west of Ireland, and could be seen in clear weather ; 
but whenever an expedition was fitted out to reach them, they 
somehow seemed to disappear. More frequently the islands 
were described as lying beyond the Canaries. There lay, as 
the Portuguese declared, the island which had been sometimes 
lighted upon by accident, but which when sought could never 
be found. Its existence was regarded as so certain that we 
are told of one adventurer who received a formal grant of it 
" when it should be found." And when the Portuguese 
Crown ceded to Spain its rights over the Canaries, the island 
of St. Brandan was specially included, being described as " the 
island which has not yet been found." In 1526, 1570, and 
again in 1605, expeditions set sail from the Canaries to discover 
this land ; but all met with uniform failure. Still the belief 
died hard, and did not become extinct for many years after 
the third of these unsuccessful voyages. Any one who has the 
curiosity to look over the old atlases of the seventeenth 
century, will find as late as 1630, the Isle of Brandan delineated 
as an island of no great size, lying west of Ireland and north- 
west of the Canaries ; it is even said that in one map published 
as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, this fabulous 
land is still indicated. 

There is yet remaining one more belief which ought to be 
mentioned in this place — that of the Fountain of Youth. The 
original locality, it is true, was in the East as is shown in the 
fabulous letter of Prester John to the Byzantine Emperor 
Manuel ; indeed the Pseudo-Mandeville says that he found it 
himself in Ceylon, only it was not true that one draught of it 
gave perpetual youth — this was only acquired by a regular 
course of several years' drinking. He had only time to try it 
for two days, found it pleasant to the taste, and thought he 



228 THE EARTHLY PARADISE 

felt all the better for it, but experienced no occult effect. How- 
ever, in the fourteenth century the fountain migrated to the 
most western of the Canaries. It was not even destroyed by 
the discovery of America, but was only relegated to one of the 
Bahamas in the West Indies. Finally, it receded to the 
mainland of North America, and was sought by Soto in Florida. 
There, as was to be expected, it was not to be found, and it 
became obsolete long before the day of the final disappearance 
of St. Brandan's Isle. Two more beliefs which attributed 
wonders to the West may be passed over as not bearing any 
relation to the Earthly Paradise, though proceeding probably 
from similar sources in the old Keltic mythology. These were 
St. Patrick's Purgatory, a sort of subterranean soul-land, 
modified by Christianity into an entrance to the region of 
purification by suffering ; and the island in a lake of Ulster in 
which no one could die. There, as we read, when the inhabit- 
ants reached extreme old age and became nothing but a 
burden to themselves, they had to be carried to the mainland 
before their spirit could depart. This is no doubt another 
perverted form of the old belief in the deathless land of the 
West. 

In conclusion, there is one more view which we venture, 
with all deference, to suggest. Surely the mediaeval folk were 
much the happier for all these ideas. Our own map of the 
world is dreadfully deficient in romance : it is really very hard 
to feel an eager interest in the exploration of Central Africa, or 
the discovery of the South Pole. If some traveller does 
delete the last white patch in the map of the Congo Free 
State, or push up some ice-crack to an open Antarctic Sea, we 
do not expect to gain any great good from it, or to hear 
any particularly startling news about these regions. It 
will be the difficulty of the task, not its results, that will 
direct attention to them. The discovery of a few more 
tribes of thoroughly uninteresting negroes, or a few more 
ice-blocked bays, has nothing in it to stir the heart of the 
world. We look for no marvels to be unveiled, no great prob- 
lems that are to be solved. The naturalist may indeed be 
gladdened by the knowledge of a new species of Arctic gull, or 
a few varieties of tropical plants ; the collector of folk-lore 



THE EARTHLY PARADISE 229 

may rejoice over some new and original negro funeral cere- 
monies ; the merchant may find a new market for his cottons, 
— but these things will not prove very interesting to the mass 
of mankind. 

Now in the middle ages everything was exactly the reverse 
of this. The greater part of the world's surface was still 
unknown. There was hardly anything on which the adven- 
turous traveller might not come. He might reach populous 
lands and cities, rich far beyond the ideas of the European 
world ; he might, on the other hand, come to the land of the 
griffin and the flying serpent, or, as Shakespeare puts it in 
Othello, to 

" antres vast and deserts idle, 
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven," 

and to 

" The Cannibals that each other eat, 
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads 
Do grow beneath their shoulders." 

There was a glorious uncertainty in these voyages of discovery : 
one man would find the passage to India round the Cape of 
Good Hope, or kingdoms like Mexico or Peru ; another would 
follow after equally uncertain rumours, and meet nothing but 
disaster, or even never be heard of again. Discovery could 
not possibly manage to be uninteresting in those days ; and 
as if there were not enough real marvels to be found, the 
legends were continually holding out fabulous ones for the 
adventurous to seek. Now of all the legends, it can hardly be 
disputed that the legends of the Earthly Paradise were the 
most attractive. Men might not desire at once to leave their 
present life for the search after the beautiful land of endless 
rest without death ; but still it was a comfortable feeling to 
know that such a land did exist. If a man's life went hope- 
lessly wrong, if he was in despair and felt that the world was 
out of joint, there was still this refuge left for him ; it only 
needed a little more perseverance and courage than that of 
the last voyager who had almost reached the happy land, and 
then there would be for ever a quiet and blissful repose in 
some Avilion of the Western sea. We do not say that the 



230 THE EARTHLY PARADISE 

men of the fourteenth or fifteenth century were happier than 
we of the twentieth ; but certainly it was something not to be 
bound down by the prosaic bonds of that knowledge which 
forbids us to dream that we may 

" Some day be at rest, 
And follow the shining sinking sun down into the shining West." 

The world grows terribly small, and as it shrinks the glory 
of romance and adventure dies away. 



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SOCIAL AND DIPLOMATIC MEMORIES, 
1884-1893. 

By the Right Hon. Sib J. RENNELL RODD, G.C.B., 

G.C.M.G. 

Formerly H.M. Ambassador at Rome. 

One Volume. Demy 8vo. With Portrait. 21s. net. 

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association with the " Balhol set " of Jowett's day, and his acquain- 
tance with Oscar Wilde, Whistler, Burne-Jones, Gladstone and 
Browning among many others. He entered the diplomatic service 
in 1884 and joined the Embassy at Berlin, where he remained for 
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During this period he was honoured with the intimate friendship 
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illness and death is of intense interest, as are his recollections of 
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2 Edward Arnold <Sc Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 

Then followed a short time spent at the Embassy at Constantinople, 
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By IAN COLVIN. 

In two Volumes. Demy 8vo. With Portraits. 32s. net. 

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he graduated in the usual way, and after holding one or two hos- 
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of the Cape Colony before he died. 

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Edward Arnold <Sc Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 3 

OBSERVATIONS ON FOX-HUNTING 
AND THE MANAGEMENT OF 
HOUNDS. 

By Colonel JOHN COOK. 
With an Introduction by Lord Willoughby de Broke. 

With 8 Coloured Plates from Contemporary Prints and Paintings 

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Uniform with the above. 

THE LIFE OF A FOX. 

By THOMAS SMITH. 

THE DIARY OF A HUNTSMAN. 

By THOMAS SMITH. 

With Introductions by Lord Willoughby de Broke, and 
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Price One Guinea net each volume. 



4 Edward Arnold & Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 

MEMORIES OF THE MONTHS. 

Seventh Series. 

By the Right Hon. Sir HERBERT MAXWELL, Bart., 
F.R.S., D.C.L., LL.D. 

One Volume. Illustrated. Large Crown 8vo. 10s. 6d. net. 

The appearance of a new series of " Memories of the Months " 
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deal of new and suggestive material about Flowers, Birds, Animals, 
Fish, Butterflies, and Human Nature. If we take as samples the 
months of July and September, we get a fair idea of the variety and 
interest of the volume. July contains sections on " The Elusive 
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A HISTORY OF EUROPEAN DIPLO- 
MACY, 1815-1914. 

By R. B. MOWAT, M.A., 

Fellow op Corpus Chbisti College, Oxpoed. 
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It is not merely the relations of Britain to other countries that 



Edward Arnold & Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 5 

the British citizen must know about ; he must understand the 
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6 Edward Arnold & Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 

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Edward Arnold & Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 7 

THE FIVE JARS. 

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Provost of Eton College. 
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By the same Author. 

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A THIN GHOST AND OTHERS. 

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8 Edward Arnold & Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 

ACROSS AMERICA BY MOTOR CYCLE. 

By C. K. SHEPHERD. 

Late Captain Royal Ant Force. 

One Volume. Demy Svo. With Illustrations. 12s. 6d. net. 

The author was told that he was the first Englishman to accom- 
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The whole trip, covering just 5,000 miles, was undertaken 
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but his list of engine replacements included five new cylinders, 
three pistons, five gudgeon pins, three complete sets of bearings, 
two connecting rods and eleven sparking plugs. His great trouble 
came from the terrible condition of the roads : these varied from 
occasional excellent stretches of concrete down to what is euphe- 
mistically termed " natural gravel," apparently a fenced track 
where vehicles have to make their own way over the untouched 
soil ! Some of the author's photographs bear eloquent testimony 
to the state of these so-called roads. 

Apart from the cycling adventures, which are many and various, 
Mr. Shepherd has a good eye for the beauties and eccentricities of 
nature, as well as the handiwork of man in the remote western 
regions visited. His course lay through the Alleghanies, Cincinnati, 
Springfield, Kansas City, Pueblo, Santa Fe, the Petrified Forest 
of Arizona, Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon, across the Mohave Desert 
to Los Angeles and thence to San Francisco. He possesses a bright 
and graphic style and an unfailing sense of humour which must 
have served him well in many an awkward situation. 

THE MIND OF A WOMAN. 

By Mrs. PHILIP CHAMPION DE CRESPIGNY. 

One Volume. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 
The purpose of this book is to inquire into the respective attri- 
butes of man and of woman, in order to compare their claims to 
take part successfully in the conduct of human affairs. It traces 
the evolution of woman from the prehistoric cave-dweller to the 
modern " heiress of all the ages," showing how essentially different 
have been the fines on which her development has proceeded as 
compared with that of man. Many interesting examples are quoted 
from history to show the discouraging and cramping effects of her 
environment, in circumstances sufficient to account for her apparent 
incapacities and shortcomings. But notwithstanding the crushing 



Edward Arnold & Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 9 

nature of her environment, she gradually unfolded characteristics 
which, though dissimilar to man's, may prove to be no less valuable 
in the conduct of public affairs. 

The position of the early- Victorian woman was indeed little, if at 
all, in advance of her predecessors who lived in the great days of 
Greece and Rome. Step after step, gained by centuries of arduous 
struggles for freedom, was lost through the relapse of nations into 
barbarism during periods of war when physical strength replaced 
the gentler sanctions of civilization. 

In such periods the Woman's cause languishes : man must always 
excel in dealing with material forces, while woman's more delicate 
organization needs the atmosphere of civilization for its develop- 
ment. With favourable surroundings she is perhaps in closer touch 
with the sources of inspiration than man ; but woman's debt to 
man, no less than man's debt to woman, is firmly insisted upon. 
The keynote of the book is that despite the trammels of a difficult 
environment she has developed qualities which are lacking in the 
other sex, but equally potent and conducive to the common weal. 

ERMYTAGE AND THE CURATE. 

By A. M. COGSWELL. 

With a Foreword by Captain Stephen Gwynn. 

One Volume. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 

It is not necessary to describe the Curate. Ermytage had been a 
master in a private school, and both gentlemen found their way into 
the Army from patriotic motives, before the days of Conscription. 
Both of them were wounded and relegated to the Labour Corps, 
and then their troubles began. Their patriotism could not stand 
the strain, and they became, alas ! habitual shirkers. Whether the 
reader will peruse their misfortunes in wrathful indignation at the 
treatment meted out to free Britons or with secret satisfaction at 
the miscarriage of their strivings after " soft jobs," depends alto- 
gether upon the point of view. Some of the situations are too 
humorous for tears, others too sad to laugh over. In the back- 
ground, absent yet ever present, is Helen, Ermytage's fiancee, and 
very much to the front is charming Sister Joan, whose part in the 
story it is hardly fair to disclose. 

The foreword by Captain Stephen Gwynn shows that this able 
critic has felt the seriousness of the impression conveyed by the 
story. " I rejoice," he says, " that the book should be published, 
for it is a desperate picture of the slavery inseparable from any such 
war of nations. . . . Generally, the book interested me very 
greatly, and has left a mark on my mind. I think it would do the 
same for anyone who was in the war or who was affected personally 
by the war ; and it does not leave a desolating impression, though 
it contributes to one's fervent resolve to prevent, if it be humanly 
possible, the whole thing from ever happening again." 



10 Edward Arnold & Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 

THE UNFORTUNATE COLONEL DESPARD 

And other Essays 

By SIR CHARLES OMAN, M.P. 

■Chichele Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. 

Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net. 

This volume of Historical Essays by Sir Charles Oman comprises 
a series of excursions into by-paths of History, made by the Author 
during his leisure moments in the last few years. Several of the 
Essays are brilliant studies in Biography, such as the one which 
gives a title to the volume. Others deal with broader aspects of 
History and the difficulties which meet the student in forming a 
sound judgment upon the materials before him. In this category 
will be found an extremely interesting chapter on " Rumour in 
time of War," a subject the importance of which the Author had 
exceptional opportunities of realizing a few years ago. 

The many admirers of Sir Charles Oman's works will find in this 
volume all the qualities which lend value and distinction to his 
previous books. It is not necessary to be a serious student of history 
to enjoy his lucid, incisive style, to appreciate his fearless and 
confident judgments, to be enthralled by the romantic character 
of the episodes he describes. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND 
THE AIR MINISTRY 

By H. A. JONES, M.C. 

Director of the Historical Section (Air Branch) of the Committee 
of Imperial Defence. 

Crown Svo, cloth. 2s. 6d. net. 

Few men of our generation were more popular than the late 
Sir Walter Raleigh, who made friends for himself wherever he 
went by his ready sympathy and broad-minded humanity. A 
notable tribute to his character will be found in this study of his 
relations to the historical section of the Air Branch. Mr. Jones 
was associated with Raleigh during his researches into the history 
of the war, and is able to illuminate his record with many personal 
touches which give it charm, and bear yet further witness to the 
geniality and wisdom of Raleigh's temperament. 



Edward Arnold & Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 11 

FIRE AND SWORD IN THE SUDAN. 

By SLATIN PASHA. 

Translated and Edited by 

General Sir REGINALD WINGATE, Bart., G.C.B. 

New Edition. Illustrated. 6s. net. 

The story of the experiences of Slatin Pasha as a ruler, a soldier 
and a captive in the Sudan is one of the most striking romances of 
modern times. It is a chapter of human experience wherein truth 
far surpassed fiction in hairbreadth escapes and deeds of daring 
beyond what seemed possible. One places this volume on a shelf 
of its own as the authority for all time on the great Mohammedan 
upheaval in the Sudan which was accompanied by an amount 
of human suffering that defies calculation. 

GENERAL ASTRONOMY. 

By H. SPENCER JONES, M.A., B.So. 

Chief Assistant at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, late 
Fellow op Jesus College, Cambridge. 

With numerous Illustrations. One Volume. Demy 8vo. 

21s. net. 

Astronomy is a branch of science which has always appealed to 
the popular imagination. It was studied in ancient times and our 
knowledge of the heavens is still being enlarged. The tendency in 
recent years has been to extend our observations far beyond the 
little system ruled by our sun and to explore the vast world 
beyond. 

This year the Royal Astronomical Society celebrated its centenary, 
and it is a happy coincidence that there should appear a volume 
containing a general survey of our knowledge of Astronomy. The 
author is an eminent authority and is the leader of the British 
Expedition to Christmas Island for the observation of the total 
eclipse of the sun on September 21. His treatment of the subject 
is essentially non-mathematical, and while mathematical methods 
of reasoning have been followed where possible, it will be found 
that knowledge of higher mathematics has not been assumed. 

After a general discussion of the celestial sphere, the author 
devotes chapters to the earth, the moon and the sun. Among the 
subjects considered, may be mentioned the size and the motions of 
these celestial bodies, their distance from each other, the occurrence 
of eclipses and occultations, and the phenomena of sunspots. Then 
follow two interesting chapters dealing with astronomical instru- 
ments and astronomical observations, from which the reader will 
realize how improvements in the manufacture of instruments and 
in the sensitivity of photographic plates have enabled greater 
accuracy to be attained and new discoveries to be made. Next we 



12 Edward Arnold & Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 

have an account of planetary motions and a description of the 
several planets and their satellites. Subsequent chapters are 
entitled " Comets and Meteors," " The Stars," " Double and Vari- 
able Stars " and " The Stellar Universe," and after reading these one 
cannot fail to be awestruck, though uplifted, at the very vastness of 
the universe. 

The author has taken considerable trouble in procuring a repre- 
sentative set of astronomical photographs from the records of the 
various observations, both of this and. other countries, and the 
value of the book is greatly enhanced by the twenty-four magnificent 
plates, in which especial care has been taken to ensure accurate 
reproductions of the photographs. 

A NEW VOLUME IN "THE MODERN EDUCATOR'S LIBRARY." 

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE 
PSYCHOLOGY OF EDUCATION. 

By JAMES DREVER, M.A., D.Sc. 

Lecturer in Psychology in the University op Edinburgh. 
Author of " Instinct in Man," " The Psychology of Industry," etc. 

One Volume. Crown Svo. Price 6s. net. 

Few words are more familiar to the plain man than the word 
psychology. What is this psychology which seems to be the 
novelist's bait, the journalist's magic formula and the physician's 
new prescription for all sorts and conditions of men ? Is it some- 
thing wholly technical, increasingly associated with laboratories and 
consulting-rooms, part of the necessary equipment of the teacher 
and pastor, or is it something with which the plain man and the 
ordinary reader are likewise vitally concerned ? This is the pro- 
blem which guides Dr. Drever in his important contribution to the 
Modern Educator's Library. Psychology is the concern of the 
plain man as well as of the professional person. For, as Dr. Drever 
shows, psychology is primarily concerned with real experience, the 
real behaviour of real human beings, not with artificial abstractions 
but with everyday folk in their everyday ways. The daily 
intercourse of ordinary life depends for its smoothness and its success 
upon understanding, sympathy and insight. Dr. Drever shows us 
how we do think, how we do feel, how we do act, as a preliminary 
to the consideration of how we ought to think, ought to feel, and 
ought to act. We say we are persons : he shows us in what sense 
the real truth is that we are persons in the making, not already 
made, and this is the fascinating feature about his work. We see, 
in his pages, how the half -hidden factors in Experience, whether they 
be the commonplaces of poetry from Shakespeare to Wordsworth, 
or the discoveries of modern investigators like Freud, Jung and 
Bergson conspire together, work wonderfully towards making us 



Edward Arnold & Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 13 

what we are and what we are to be. Experience educates and 
experience is lifelong. Dr. Drever reveals how it is that Experience 
educates. Of the technical jargon employed in purely technical 
treatises there is no trace, but rather a straightforward account of 
the nature of Everyday Experience and the conditions of our 
mental development. 

THE MODERN EDUCATOR'S LIBRARY. 

General Editor : Prof. A. A. COCK, 
Professor of Education in University College, Southampton. 

Crown 8vo. Uniform cloth binding. 6s. net each. 
" The Modern Educator's Library " has been designed to give 
considered expositions of the best theory and practice in English 
education of to-day. It is planned to cover the principal problems 
of educational theory in general, of curriculum and organization, 
of some unexhausted aspects of the history of education, and of 
special branches of applied education. 

EDUCATION : ITS DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES. 

By T. PERCY NUNN, M.A., D.Sc., 

Professor of Education in the University of London. 
Fourth Impression. 

THE CHILD UNDER EIGHT. 

By E. R. MURRAY, 

Vice -Principal of Maria Grey Training College, and 
HENRIETTA BROWN-SMITH, L.L.A., 

Lecturer in Education, Goldsmiths' College, University of London. 
Third Impression. 

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 

By SOPHIE BRYANT, D.Sc., Litt.D., 

Late Head Mistress of the North London Collegiate School for Gerls. 

THE TEACHING OF MODERN FOREIGN 
LANGUAGES IN SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY. 

By H. G. ATKINS, M.A., 

Professor of German in King's College, University of London, and 

H. L. HUTTON, M.A., 

Senior Modern Language Master at Merchant Taylors School. 

ORGANIZATION AND CURRICULA OF SCHOOLS. 

By W. G. SLEIGHT, M.A., D.Lit. 

Second Impression. 
Other volumes in preparation. 



14 Edward Arnold & Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 

RECENTLY PUBLISHED. 

A NEW MEDLEY OF MEMORIES. 

BY THE 

Right Rev. Sib DAVID HUNTER BLAIR, Bt., O.S.B., M.A., 

Titular Abbot of Dunfermline. 

With Portrait. Demy 8vo. 16s. net. 

" It is pleasant to get a further instalment of this born raconteur's reminis- 
cences. Every page of his new volume has its sagacious saying or apt 
anecdote. A human and humane book." — Morning Post. 

" Sir David Blair has followed up one successful book with another. His 
high spirits enable him to call up the past in a continuous flow of entertain- 
ment." — Daily News. 

" The book is a mine of good things, for the Abbot of Dunfermline has 
met many interesting people, and has a kindly eye for the humours of life." — 
Scotsman. 

" Sir David has the delightful wit one expects from a dignitary of the 
Catholic Church, and this new book makes really fascinating reading." — 
John o' London's Weekly. 

" In this second publication, we meet with the same features that made 
the previous one so agreeable : the pleasant gossip, the shrewd impressions 
of foreign travel, and above all an overflowing supply of good stories (one 
or two of which, however, look rather strange in these staid pages)." — Catholic 
Times. 

" The ' memories,' in fact, are well described as a ' medley ' ; but they 
are a very entertaining one ; and as they end with the beginning of the war 
it may be hoped that there are more of them still to come." — Westminster 
Gazette. 

Third Impression. 

MEMORIES AND NOTES OF PERSONS AND 

PLACES. 

By Sir SIDNEY COLVIN, M.A., D.Litt., 

Formerly Slade Professor of Fine Art in the University of Cambridge 
and Keeper of the Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. 

With Portrait. Third Impression. 18s. net. 

" The sloven style, the trivial matter, of so many of the Reminiscences 
which every publishing season pours forth makes all the more welcome by 
contrast a book of memories that is both rich in interest and itself a piece of 
literature. Such is Sir Sidney Colvin's ' Memories and Notes.' It is a plea- 
sure to read from beginning to end, if only for the exact and vivid phrasing, 
the sustained felicity of cadence, at times touching emotion and imagination 
at once with just that kind of beauty of sound in the words which is proper 
to fine prose." — Mr. Laurence Binyon in the Bookman. 



Edward Arnold 60 Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 15 

ADRIENNE TONER. 

By ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK 
(Mrs. Basil de Selincouiit), 

Author of " Tante," " The Encounter," " Valerie Upton," etc. 

Third Impression. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 

The American edition of this popular novel, which appeared a 
few months after the English one, was received with a storm of 
praise. The following are some of the acclamations with which it& 
advent was hailed across the Atlantic : 

" A very great and significant book, a most important event in English 
and American letters. It cuts free from the past, there has been nothing 
like it. . . . One of the two possible examples of the modern novel which 
point definitely toward the novel of to-morrow." — Zona Gale. 

" Out of the troop of a year's books comes ' Adrienne Toner,' a very pearl 
of a novel." — Kate Douglas Wiggin. 

' ' An extraordinary book. . . . The breath of life emanates from the pages 
and it is intoxication to breathe it." — Hildegarde Hawthorne in the New York 
Herald. 



THE RAINBOW BRIDGE. 

By REGINALD FARRER, 

Author oe "The Eaves of the World," " My Rock Garden," etc. 

With Illustrations and Map. Second Impression. 

21s. net. 

" A classic of travel. Of modern travellers with a sense of style, Mr. Farrer 
must take his place in the forefront alongside of Mr. Doughty, Mr. Cunning- 
hame Graham, and Mr. Norman Douglas." — Times Literary Supplement. 

" There can be no denying that Mr. Farrer was one of the great masters 
of English prose. His last book is bright with sidelights on vie intime of the 
essential China." — Morning Post. 



16 Edward Arnold da Co.'s Autumn Announcements. 

MOUNT EVEREST. 
The Reconnaissance, 1921. 

By Liettt.-Colonel C. K. HOWARD-BURY, D.S.O., 

And other Members of the Expedition. 

With 33 full-page illustrations and maps. Medium Svo. 

25s. net. 

Also a Limited Large Paper Edition, with additional plates 

in photogravure. Quarto, each copy numbered. 

£5 5s. net. 

" A remarkable contribution to the long and glorious story of British 
endeavour in the high places of the earth. The whole is a splendid record of 
clever and courageous enterprise." — The Times. 

" The book under review tells the tale of the doings of last year's journey, 
and a notable tale it is, well told, finely illustrated with wonderful photo- 
graphs, and excellently printed. The accompanying maps enable us for the 
first time to describe the articulation of the whole mountain region and to 
replace the vaguely guessed indication of culminations and connexions by 
a labyrinth of glaciers and ridges, full of meaning to geographers and those 
for whom the actual shape of the surface of the earth has interest." — Sir 
Martin Conway, M.P., in the Manchester Guardian. 

" Mr. Leigh Mallory, who led the climbing party of the Everest expedition, 
has written in ' The Reconnaissance of the Mountain ' an epic of mountain- 
eering which deserves to be an abiding possession for all those who have 
ventured themselves into the silence and desolation of the high peaks." — 
Morning Post. 

" The book put together by the members of last year's expedition, more 
especially the maps and illustrations, makes us envious. Colonel Howard 
Bury has told his story simply, with evident enjoyment. Mr. Leigh Mallory, 
who gives us the story of the reconnaissance, is terse and human and never 
tedious. He tells us exactly what we want to know." — Mr. Edmund Candler 
in the Nation. 

" The story of the journey and the climbing adventure as told separately 
by the leader and Mr. Mallory combine to make a narrative of singular variety 
which sustains its interest to the end, and is agreeably supplemented by the 
chapters of ' Natural History Notes,' contributed by Dr. Wollaston." — 
Mr. Douglas Freshfield in the New Statesman. 

" As* fascinating and picturesque as it is valuable. It will rank with the 
best of its kind, and is assured of a success that is exceptionally well deserved. 
It will satisfy both the expert and the casual reader, and there can be nothing 
but praise for all concerned in it." — Illustrated London News. 

" The book is admirably and enthusiastically written, very finely illus- 
trated, and in every way an ideal record of what will always be considered a 
classical example of exploration in its first stage." — Country Life. 

" Quite apart from its intrinsic interest it will be of the greatest value to 
everybody who wishes to appreciate the attempt which is now being made 
to continue the work and reach the absolute summit of the highest mountain 
in the world." — Wpstrn.inxter Gazette. 

London : Edward Arnold & Co., 41 & 43 Maddox Street, W.l. 



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